Upcoming Project - “Beyond Body”

Toward Living, Self-Organizing Exosuits.

What if protective gear didn’t feel like gear at all, but like a living extension of your own body?

Today, most exoskeletons and prosthetics are designed as machines strapped onto flesh: rigid frames, discrete hinges, and motors that try to approximate human movement from the outside. They can be powerful, but they’re often heavy, uncomfortable, and poorly matched to the softness and adaptability of real tissue.

With Beyond Body, we’re exploring a different path:

We aim to build computational models of synthetic, self-organizing “cells” that can assemble into layered structures—skin-like barriers, muscle-like actuators, and sensing/control layers—that could one day act as functional exosuits or even bio-inspired prosthetic surfaces.

This project begins as pure modeling and simulation, inside the open virtual lab of Systems Beyond. The long-term vision, however, is concrete: restoring mobility and independence for stroke survivors, older adults, and people in physically demanding professions who need extra support without being turned into a machine mount.

Why exosuits that behave like tissue?

Your skin, fascia, and muscles are not just “cover and motors.” They are:

• Self-repairing – constantly remodeling, healing micro-damage.

• Adaptive – stiff when needed, compliant when safe.

• Sensing and communicating – full of mechanoreceptors, nociceptors, and proprioceptive signals.

• Distributed – no single actuator; force and sensing are spread across many fibers and cells.

Conventional exoskeletons tend to do the opposite: centralized motors, rigid beams, fixed joints. They help, but they don’t belong to the body.

Beyond Body starts from a different question:

If we could design synthetic “cells” and rules of self-organization on a computer, could we discover architectures that behave more like living tissue and less like armor?

We don’t need to fabricate those cells yet. First, we need to understand the design space.

Beyond Body starts as code and equations—but the goal is simple and human: to help more people move through the world safely, confidently, and with dignity.