On-Body Robots
On-body robots are not just wearables that track, alert, or assist. They are mobile robotic systems that live on the body itself. This project used Calico, a sleeve-mounted robot probe, to help older adults imagine what such systems should do, where they should live, and how they should behave.
Passive wearables already sense, track, and notify. On-body robots introduce something different: mobility, proximity, and the potential for embodied intervention. That makes this a design problem as much as a technical one. Before building products, the project had to surface the social norms, bodily constraints, and expectations that would make this category acceptable.
The populations most likely to benefit also face the sharpest constraints around mobility, trust, stigma, and comfort.
Calico turned an otherwise speculative concept into a tangible artifact people could wear, watch, and design around.
On-body robots create questions about placement, communication, and social acceptability that neither wearables nor nearby robots resolve on their own.
The process used two phases. First, participants explored what on-body robots could be. Then they converged around concrete applications and interaction flows through storyboarding and bodystorming.
The co-design process moved from demonstration and broad ideation into grounding, contextualization, interaction flow, and bodystorming.
Participants experienced Calico, mapped possible uses, and identified where on-body robots might matter in everyday life.
Massage, physical therapy, and walking support were explored through concrete scenarios, start-to-end flows, and embodied enactment.
Each concept combined a role, a body location, a communication style, and a social identity. Together they show how wide the on-body design space really is.
Walking · Safety
An ankle-adjacent robot that quietly supports navigation and fall prevention through rhythmic cues and escalating feedback.
Walking · Companionship
A relational robot that makes going for a walk feel shared, with emotional cues and a clearer sense of beginning and ending.
Recreation · Comfort
A soft-bodied robot for sustained contact and targeted pressure, designed for comfort and relaxation rather than short utility bursts.
Rehabilitation · PT
A motivating physical therapy partner that turns repetition into feedback-rich play while adapting communication to body position.
The co-designed PT coach is a useful example because it makes the value proposition legible: the robot travels to the body part being exercised and responds in place through multimodal feedback.
Storyboard for the Gamified PT Coach: beginning the routine, sensing fatigue, encouraging progress, and stopping when exertion becomes unsafe.
The framework separates what constrains the design from what actually gets designed. It turns the workshops into something more reusable than four concepts alone.
Level 1 identifies the design scopes: Context, Human, and Application. Level 2 identifies the design factors: embodiment, topology, perception, autonomy, adoption, and communication.
Context, human factors, and application shape what is plausible, acceptable, and useful before form decisions are even made.
Embodiment, topology, perception, autonomy, adoption, and communication define how the robot actually appears and behaves.
These principles emerged from participant reactions to what felt awkward, unacceptable, inaccessible, or simply not worth wearing on the body.
01
On-body robots have to navigate public visibility and stigma. Early designs need discretion, context-awareness, and the possibility of adornment.
02
The body changes what communication is possible. Placement, posture, sensory ability, and movement all determine how feedback can work.
03
Mobility has to justify itself. The robot must offer something a static wearable cannot, while still feeling coherent enough to trust on the body.
"Outside, inside, my head is down because I'm scared to death that I'm going to hit uneven pavement."
Melanie (F/76) — on walking anxiety and the value of a sentinel-like robot
"In terms of aging eyes, losing eye sight... there has to be more than one way of communicating with you."
Raymond (M/76) — on multimodal feedback as a requirement
"If it's not good, you ask the robot to stop and it stops immediately... You're in control."
Norman (M/69) — on control as the foundation of trust
Calico and the workshops helped surface a design space, a set of concepts, and a practical framework for future on-body robots. The next step is not to re-ask whether the category exists, but to build from these grounded design directions.
