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We are committed to improving quality of life for people with walking disabilities by creating restorative and accessible products that seamlessly integrate into everyday life.
It all started in an MIT lab, during the initial feasibility studies of the MIT Skywalker, a rehabilitation robot developed by BrainE Labs founder, Dr. Tyler Susko, to offer a new form of gait therapy for people with static brain injury who exhibit foot drop.
It works by removing the floor constraint during the swing phase of gait. During the feasibility study, Aden, a brilliant study participant (hence the name Cadense), said, “it feels really easy to walk on the Skywalker, I wish I could take it with me when I walk overground”.
Aden’s feedback initiated 7 years of design, prototyping and pilot studies at UCSB. The first shoes were robotic, bulky, and ugly. Over the years, many bright students at UCSB charged forward with new designs, continuously whittling the concept down closer and closer to what has become the Cadense shoe.
A pilot study with a variable friction shoe was presented at the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society Conference in Berlin, Germany in 2019. In that pilot study, three of five subjects with brain injury or disease walked 20-55% faster within three minutes of wearing a variable friction shoe while improving the biomechanical quality of the gait, specifically by reducing the frontal plane hip angle. This was accomplished with no instruction, just simply by walking in a variable friction shoe.
Since the pilot study, the Cadense prototype has been continuously improved, studied and is now being manufactured by a reputable shoe factory. The final version of the Cadense shoe is here in limited quantity.