Abstract
Recent achievements in rehabilitative robotics modify essential parameters of the human body, such as motility. Exoskeletons used for persons with neurological impairments like spinal cord injury and stroke enter this category by rehabilitating and assisting damaged motor patterns, achievements thought impossible until not long ago. Unlike other examples leading to similar dysfunctions, such as diseases or tumors, the experience of an accident causing a spinal cord injury or the occurrence of a cerebrovascular accident is sudden and perceived as a radical event. This often leads to deep consequences for one’s own body capacities. Exoskeletons attempt to alter this condition, contributing to forge a temporary abled body, although this currently happens in the restricted space of a clinic or a lab and under very controlled conditions for the predominance of users. Using qualitative empirical material from an ongoing study in sociology, including expert and narrative interviews as well as ethnographic visits in labs and centers that design and test exoskeletons, this article addresses the challenges and gains that people with stroke and spinal cord injury experience during their training with exoskeletons. The discussed cases contribute to reassess categories from the phenomenological paradigm, disability studies, and the role medical technologies play in contemporary body worlds.
Highlights
Exoskeletal devices have steadily nourished their own field of imagination
The aim of this paper is to show what role exoskeletons play in rehabilitation and their impact on forms of bodily ability while analyzing two categories of impairments: spinal cord injuries and cerebrovascular accidents, which are more commonly known as stroke
The reason why the phenomenology of the body provides an important categorical instrumentarium to observe the changes lived by users of these devices is that the target parameter modified by exoskeletons is impaired motility, which for the limited period of the device’s use is adjusted into a form of ability
Summary
Exoskeletal devices have steadily nourished their own field of imagination. Due to the advent and proliferation of science fiction movies, their popularity has increased, influencing their conception in terms of augmentative technologies. The aim of this paper is to show what role exoskeletons play in rehabilitation and their impact on forms of bodily ability while analyzing two categories of impairments: spinal cord injuries and cerebrovascular accidents, which are more commonly known as stroke These examples shall be theoretically correlated to the conceptual background of the phenomenology of the body. The reason why the phenomenology of the body provides an important categorical instrumentarium to observe the changes lived by users of these devices is that the target parameter modified by exoskeletons is impaired motility, which for the limited period of the device’s use is adjusted into a form of ability In this sense, exoskeletons play a crucial role in the production of what I name a temporarily abled body, a concept I intend to discuss . They claim a clear displacement of ‘agency from human to artifact’ (see p. 24 in [3]) whereas they clearly advance new conceptions of how users and their impaired bodies are circumstantially produced [39]
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