image: From left to right, mechanical engineering graduate student Emma Brown, Dan Preston, Vanessa Sanchez, and mechanical engineering graduate student Amanda Johnson (Credit: Jorge Vidal, Rice University).
Credit: Jorge Vidal, Rice University.
When everyday clothes can quietly support your back during a long work shift, help you rise from a chair or steady your balance on a crowded bus, assistive technology stops looking like a medical device and starts feeling like life. That’s the vision driving a new multimillion dollar grant supported by the Canadian government called the New Frontiers in Research Fund.
Rice University professors of mechanical engineering Daniel J. Preston and Vanessa Sanchez are core partners in the project led by the University of Alberta, bringing breakthrough materials, soft-robotic actuation and human-centered design to the team.
Rice contributes two complementary strengths to the initiative. Sanchez, a researcher trained in fiber science, materials engineering and robotics, brings expertise in textile-native manufacturing for wearable robotic technologies. Her team at texlab develops smart fibers and knitted and woven structures that act as robotic materials, actuating, sensing and routing power and data for innovative garment designs that fit diverse body types and movements.
“Our goal is to create clothing that looks and feels like what people already love to wear,” Sanchez said. “If we can embed intelligence and comfort into everyday garments, we can change how people experience mobility assistance.”
Meanwhile, the Preston Innovation Laboratory specializes in control and power in compliant devices and systems. Its work emphasizes reliability, washability and all-day comfort for the proposed assistive garments, along with embedded logic and control systems that keep computation local to the garment for enhanced privacy and power efficiency.
“The challenge,” Preston said, “is to make the assistance we provide feel as natural as fabric itself — responsive but unobtrusive and almost imperceptible. We want these garments to move with people, not on them.”
Globally, billions stand to benefit from rehabilitation or mobility assistance, yet many cannot access or tolerate existing devices. Braces can be bulky and nonadaptive, powered exoskeletons are expensive and rigid and most “smart” garments today only monitor rather than assist. By moving both sensing and actuation into the fabric itself, the research team hopes to create assistive clothing that is light, washable, attractive, affordable and scalable.
Together, the Rice researchers will advise two doctoral trainees working on the project over six years, with additional undergraduate and master’s students contributing through Rice’s extensive ecosystem in design, biomechanics and health care collaborations across the Texas Medical Center.
In the near term, the Rice teams will fabricate and characterize fiber-level actuators and wash-durable sensors compatible with standard knitting and weaving processes. They will also build control prototypes that keep computation on the garment itself, ensuring both efficiency and privacy. In parallel, the groups will contribute to fit and patterning studies to guarantee comfort across a wide range of sizes, genders and mobility profiles and will leverage Rice’s partnerships with clinicians for biomechanics testing, usability studies and feedback on real-world performance.
The larger consortium aims to create garments whose fibers perform the work themselves — changing stiffness, applying gentle forces and sensing motion without bulky add-ons. The researchers’ road map focuses on three escalating use cases developed directly from end-user workshops: posture support for caregivers and older adults, smart sleeves that aid arm movement for daily tasks and leggings or shorts that assist with balance, gait and sit-to-stand transitions. Core technologies include electrostatic actuators miniaturized into fibers for safe, low-voltage assistance; textile-embedded EMG and strain sensors to detect user intent; and on-garment control systems that blend rapid, rule-based stabilization with machine learning-driven personalization, all with safety-first fallbacks.
A hallmark of the $24 million Canadian dollar award is its co-design framework with people who have lived experience of mobility limitations. Rather than try to fit finalized devices to bodies at the end of the project, the team invites these individuals, alongside clinicians, industrial partners and artists, into continuous cycles of discovery, prototyping and feedback. Public art-and-technology festivals midway and at the project’s end will showcase progress, gather input and celebrate inclusive design.
Preston and Sanchez traveled to Alberta in 2025 for the kickoff alongside their graduate students. Over the six-year award, students in the Rice cohort will also have the opportunity to rotate through partner labs via visiting positions while the Preston and Sanchez labs will host visitors from the University of Alberta and other participating institutions, building a pipeline of talent at the intersection of materials, apparel engineering and human-machine interaction.