Simulating the Healthy Body : How Exoskeletal Devices Invent New Forms of Capability in Rehabilitative Environment

Abstract

Exoskeletons are recent robotic developments in rehabilitation that draw attention to new ways of perceiving impairments. While simulating human walking or movements of the arms, exoskeletons redefine basic experiential parameters such as “motor intentionality” (Merleau-Ponty, [1945] 2012, p. 112-113; Pacherie, 2018), but also various forms of experiencing one’s body as being abled. Hence, exoskeletons are markers of a partial transition from “I cannot” to “I can”, which they perform through the simulation of healthy bodies. Although these changes take place mostly in the confined space of a clinic or lab, they are of major importance, and open the possibility to interrogate how the contextual use of exoskeletons in clinical environments changes the status of their users to “temporarily abled.” In these new rehabilitative techniques, users are engaged in specific forms of “body work” (Gimlin, 2002; Gimlin, 2007). After first describing the current state of exoskeletal devices, I will analyze how healthy bodies are used as materials to provide models for impaired ones and discuss procedures of simulation based on a logic of “essentialization.” In the next section, I will explore the specificity of “body work” with exoskeletons for rehabilitation purposes and how further conceptions of intercorporeality emerge due to the development of these novel technologies. I will support my arguments with excerpts from qualitative empirical material from sociological research conducted between 2014 and 2021 and correlate them to the phenomenology of the body.