SOMA and STRIDE: One Designs. The Other Records.
Prosthetic care has two blind spots: the designer cannot see the wearer’s full day, and the wearer cannot articulate what the designer needs to hear. SOMA closes the first gap with research tools that centre design on lived experience. STRIDE closes the second with a personal notebook that turns daily observations into structured evidence. Together, they complete the loop between the design studio and the daily life.
Prosthetic care runs on a paradox. The prosthetist has the training to adjust the socket, but they see the wearer for one hour every few months. The wearer lives with the prosthesis for every other hour, but they lack the vocabulary and the structure to communicate what is happening at the interface.
The result is predictable. The prosthetist asks how the socket has been. The wearer says "fine, mostly." The adjustment is based on a single-point observation in a clinical setting — not on the 2,000 hours of daily use since the last appointment.
Two products. Two sides of the same gap.
SOMA: what the designer cannot see
SOMA is a research and learning prototype for the people who design prosthetic care. It exists because traditional design starts with the socket’s dimensions rather than the person’s day.
Three guided care journeys track synthetic users through daily scenarios — commuting, stairs, changing fit — with pressure measured in kPa, volume change as a percentage, and reported discomfort on a 0–10 scale across a full day. The insight is quantitative: 72.8 kPa normal pressure, -2.2% volume change, 3.3/10 discomfort at seven hours. A static fitting cannot capture this variation.
Seven research frontiers explore what comes next: sensory return, interface sensing, adaptive sockets, muscle interfaces, shared control, regional materials, and digital-twin modelling. 3D inspection shows what a design is. 4D inspection shows what a design does over time.
The continuous care memory exports findings as PDF or Markdown, linking evidence to design decisions. SOMA gives the designer the day-long picture that a fitting appointment cannot provide.
STRIDE: what the wearer cannot say
STRIDE is a private digital notebook for the people who wear prostheses. It exists because "it hurts sometimes, maybe in the afternoon" is real information in an unusable format.
The four-step workflow converts daily experience into structured evidence:
Describe the prosthesis — one page per limb, documenting socket, liner, and components. The baseline that makes every subsequent entry interpretable.
Check in when it feels different — log location, activity context, and warning signs. Time-gated entries capture morning, afternoon, and evening separately.
Keep photos and advice — annotate photos with dated clinical notes and localised discomfort markers. The record accumulates across months.
Compare two hours — track the same activity at different times of day. The morning commute versus the evening commute reveals volume change, pressure shifts, and comfort patterns that only become visible in comparison.
The 3D interactive explorer helps the wearer understand the anatomy — residual limb, liner, socket, suspension, pylon — with an Ottobock component library (Genium X4, C-Leg 4, Kenevo). Understanding what you wear makes you better at describing what you feel.
Revocable single-issue case linking lets the wearer share a specific concern with their prosthetist via email token without opening the entire record. The wearer controls what is shared, with whom, and for how long.
The loop
SOMA and STRIDE are not the same product seen from two angles. They are two products that complete a loop:
SOMA gives the designer the day-long, force-level, experience-centred picture of what prosthetic use actually looks like — the research and visualisation tools to design for lived reality rather than clinical moments.
STRIDE gives the wearer the structure to document what actually happens between appointments — the personal ledger that converts subjective experience into evidence the designer can act on.
The designer sees forces the wearer cannot feel. The wearer feels experiences the designer cannot see. SOMA makes the invisible forces visible. STRIDE makes the unspoken experiences structured.
Neither product alone closes the gap. Together, they connect the design studio to the daily life and the daily life back to the design studio.
What neither product does
Neither product diagnoses, prescribes, or claims the prosthesis is safe to wear. SOMA uses synthetic examples and concept imagery — no prosthetic hardware is physically connected. STRIDE is a journaling and educational tool — clinical decisions belong to the care team.
The boundary is deliberate. These are not clinical tools replacing clinical judgment. They are information tools giving both sides of the relationship better information to work with.
The prosthetic care pair within the health stack
The portfolio’s health stack is now five products. SOMA and STRIDE form a pair within it:
- Healthcare Playbook — strategy for clinical AI deployment.
- VITAL — sandbox for pre-deployment workflow testing.
- MedConsult AI — clinical workflow in production.
- SOMA — prosthetic care research for the designer.
- STRIDE — prosthetic care records for the wearer.
The first three serve clinical AI. The last two serve prosthetic care. SOMA and STRIDE are the designer-wearer pair: one designs for the life beyond the limb, the other records the life being lived.
Both products are live and free to use.
Enter the SOMA Studio → — the research prototype for designers.
Open STRIDE → — the personal notebook for wearers.
Launch VITAL → — healthcare AI sandbox.
Richard Leclézio
Enterprise Transformation & AI Delivery Leader