Bodo Hoenen

When Bodo’s daughter Lorelei became paralyzed, the two worked together to build her a robotic exoskeleton arm brace – without any prior experience. Then they shared their work so others could build one too.

Stuck in the hospital, with doctors unable to provide reasonable solutions they set out to create their own. After researching options, they decided to try to build a robotic exoskeleton arm brace that would attempt to pick up signals from her damaged motor neurons and use those as a control signal for the exoskeleton. The hope was that through continually encouraging her to send signals to her paralyzed arm, as if it worked, would increase the chances her arm would heal. With no idea how to build it, they reached out to communities of experts in various fields. In Germany and South Africa they found electronics experts, In Canada, they found mechanical experts, at Google, they found machine learning experts, in the end, hundreds offered their advice and together they developed a completely open solution. And now Lorelei can move!