Madglove
Madglove: from a physiotherapist's insight to a manufacturable assistive glove for people with hand spasticity
Voxdale partnered with Madglove to take an early-stage concept — a wearable assistive glove for people with hand spasticity — from hand-sewn prototypes and patient feedback to a validated functional prototype with integrated electronics, mechanics, and a clear path to manufacturing.
Executive Summary
Madalina Riurean, an exercise scientist and physiotherapist, had spent years working with stroke survivors and spinal cord injury patients who struggled to open their hands. She knew the problem intimately and had already built early prototypes with her co-founders — using 3D prints, glue, and her mother's sewing skills.
What she needed was a partner who could take that clinical insight and turn it into an engineered product: something that "fits like a garment," supports independent use, and can actually be manufactured.
Voxdale ran the full development process — framing, concept exploration, functional prototyping, electronics and mechanics integration, BOM development, and manufacturing preparation. The hardest challenge was designing for spasticity itself: a condition that varies daily between and within patients, in a domain — soft goods — where the engineering rules are different.
The result is a validated prototype ready for clinical validation and manufacturing scale.
"We had a powerful idea and the drive to make it a reality. Voxdale brought the expertise, creativity, and methodology to turn that idea into a product we could touch, test, and trust."
— Jeremiah Makinde, Founder, Madglove
Client Context
Madglove is the product of a journey that started with Madalina Riurean's Bachelor's thesis in Romania, where she studied the effects of stroke on hand function. Through hands-on work with patients and continuous feedback collection, she identified what was missing: an assistive device that people with spasticity could use independently, without social stigma, and with enough comfort that they would actually wear it.
At the University of Amsterdam, Madalina joined forces with co-founders who shared her mission. Jeremiah Makinde brought commercial focus and a natural connection with patients and users. Sitah contributed an industrial design background. Together, they built early prototypes — 3D prints, glued components, hand-sewn parts — and tested them with real patients, refining their thinking with each iteration.
When Madglove approached Voxdale, they had a clear vision, real clinical knowledge, and early prototypes that proved the concept was worth pursuing. What they needed was an engineering partner who could take all of that and turn it into a product that could be manufactured, certified, and scaled.
The Brief
The clinical brief.
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A wearable assistive glove that helps people with hand spasticity open their fingers and grasp objects
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Designed for independent use — no clinician required in the room
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Maximum comfort and wearability: it must "fit like a garment," not feel like a medical appliance
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Integrated mechanical actuation and electronics, designed to be invisible within the soft goods form factor
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No social stigma: the user should feel comfortable wearing it in daily life
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A clear pathway to manufacturing and eventually to clinical validation
The harder, less obvious part.
The brief carried challenges that were not just technical, but structural:
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Spasticity is not a fixed variable. The force required to open a person's hand changes not only between patients but within the same patient from day to day — influenced by sleep quality, stress, and activity level. Any design that works for one state may fail in another.
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Soft goods engineering is different. Most hardware products are designed around rigid components. Madglove had to function as a wearable — conforming to a hand, stretching with movement, feeling like clothing. Mechanical and electronic elements had to be integrated without compromising either function or feel.
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New product category. This was not an iteration of an existing assistive glove. Every design decision — from actuation approach to connector strategy to materials — had to be made from scratch, without an established product as reference.
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From passion project to engineered product. The Madglove founders had deep clinical knowledge and genuine empathy for their users. The project required translating that knowledge into engineering requirements, manufacturing constraints, and a development process that would survive contact with real production realities.
What Voxdale Delivered
Voxdale ran the full product development process from framing to production-ready design.
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Idea framing and requirements. Voxdale started with a structured workshop process: challenging assumptions, defining the core use case, mapping user needs across patient, caregiver, and clinical contexts, and translating the Madglove vision into clear engineering and design requirements. Budget, timeline, and risk were assessed at this stage, not later.
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Concept exploration. Voxdale explored multiple design directions — sketching, modelling, and building early mockups to investigate how mechanics, electronics, and soft goods could be integrated. Functional feasibility and ergonomics were evaluated in parallel. Early ideas were tested quickly and discarded or developed based on what they revealed.
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Fit and roadmap. Voxdale and Madglove evaluated the concept options together and aligned on the direction that best met the clinical, commercial, and manufacturing brief. This produced both a validated concept and a clear development roadmap — grounded in what the team had already tested and learned, not based on hope.
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Functional prototyping. Voxdale developed a series of functional prototypes — moving from 3D-printed components and breadboard electronics through to integrated demonstrators combining mechanical actuation, electronics, and soft goods in a single working system. Each prototype was tested against clinical requirements and the user experience brief. Patient input shaped the iteration process throughout.
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Electronics and mechanics integration. The electronics and mechanical actuation system were designed to live inside the soft goods form factor — invisible in the final product, reliable under the variable conditions spasticity creates, and compatible with the wearability requirements established from the start.
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Alpha builds and BOM. Voxdale developed alpha prototypes designed with production technologies in mind, together with a Bill of Materials including component suppliers, cost, lead times, and minimum order quantities. Manufacturing partners were engaged early enough to ensure the design was buildable at cost, not just at prototype scale.
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Production-ready design. The final deliverable was a design ready for clinical validation and manufacturing — not a concept or proof of concept, but a developed product with the technical documentation to move forward.
How We Worked
A focused multidisciplinary team, working closely with the Madglove founders at every stage.
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Product navigator (Bart Verleije) — overall direction, technical decision-making, primary contact for the Madglove team.
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Engineering team (Rien, Jan, Tom, Kristof) — concept design, soft goods and mechanical engineering, electronics integration, prototyping.
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Madglove founders — clinical knowledge, patient access, user feedback, and commercial direction. Madalina's rehabilitation expertise was a live input to design decisions throughout. Jeremiah kept the team connected to real users. Sitah contributed industrial design thinking to the concept exploration phase.
The team ran fast sketch-to-prototype loops, using Voxdale's in-house workshop to build and test quickly. Patient feedback was structured into the process, not treated as a post-prototype check. Manufacturers were engaged before the architecture was locked, so the design that went into alpha builds was one that suppliers could actually make.
The Hardest Challenge — and How We Solved It
The challenge.
Designing a wearable assistive glove that works reliably for people whose spasticity varies from day to day — in a product category that didn't exist yet, in a domain (soft goods) that demands different engineering thinking than rigid hardware.
Why it was difficult.
Spasticity is not a static input. The force required to open a hand with spasticity can change significantly between morning and evening, between a stressful day and a restful one. A mechanical system calibrated for one state will be too weak or too forceful in another. Most medical devices address a fixed biomechanical parameter. Madglove had to address a variable one — in a product the user would wear independently, without clinical supervision, in their daily life.
Soft goods added another layer of complexity. The mechanical and electronic components had to be integrated into a substrate that stretches, conforms, washes, and ages differently from the rigid housings that most embedded systems live in.
What would not work.
A rigid exoskeleton approach would have been mechanically simpler, but would have failed the founders' core brief: no social stigma, maximum comfort, independent use. A purely textile solution would have solved the wearability challenge but couldn't deliver the actuation force or electronics integration the product required.
What we changed:
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Spasticity range as a design input, not an edge case. The mechanical actuation system was designed against a range of spasticity states, not a single representative condition. The variability was treated as the core engineering constraint from the first concept.
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Soft goods and electronics co-designed. The integration of mechanical and electronic elements into the soft substrate was addressed at concept stage, not added after the glove design was set. Materials selection, attachment strategies, and routing of components were part of the design conversation from the beginning.
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Patient feedback in the loop. Madglove's founders had direct access to patients. Voxdale structured that access into the development process — not as a final usability check, but as a recurring input that shaped which prototypes to build and which directions to abandon.
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Fast physical prototyping. Because the design space was large and the constraints were novel, Voxdale prioritised building over planning. Sketches became physical objects quickly. Problems invisible in a CAD model were discovered and resolved in the workshop.
Outcome
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Validated functional prototype integrating soft goods, mechanical actuation, and electronics.
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Design ready for clinical validation and manufacturing.
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Clear development roadmap from concept to production scale.
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Full Bill of Materials with supplier and cost data.
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Patient-informed design process throughout, from framing to prototype testing.
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Voxdale and Madglove worked together from 2023 to 2024 across the full development arc — framing, ideation, fit, concept development, detailed development, and manufacturing preparation.
What This Proves for Similar Teams
Madglove is relevant for health tech founders, social entrepreneurs, and startup founders who have a hardware concept rooted in genuine clinical or user insight — who have validated the problem, built early prototypes, and now need an engineering partner to take them from rough concept to a manufacturable product.
This case shows how Voxdale runs that kind of project: a structured process that respects the founder's domain knowledge while bringing engineering rigour to every design decision; fast physical prototyping that surfaces problems before they become expensive; and a multidisciplinary team that can hold soft goods, mechanics, and electronics together in a single development track.
It also shows that Voxdale does not require a brief to fit a familiar product category. Madglove was a new kind of product in a domain Voxdale had not specialised in. That novelty was part of the challenge — and part of what made the outcome credible.
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