Summering in Kendall Square

An internship at Myomo, an MIT spinoff company, gave Safa Jebri hands-on experience building robotic exoskeletons.

While some students use the summer break to kick back and relax, Safa Jebri, a rising junior at MIT, is hard at work making wearable robotics at Myomo—a medical device company—in Kendall Square in Cambridge.

Jebri grew up wanting to help people. She thought about maybe becoming a doctor, following in the footsteps of many of her Tunisian family members. Ultimately, she was drawn to technology and found her way to MIT. Now Jebri is using the skills she’s honing as a Mechanical Engineering major to do the very thing she set out to do: help people.

Jebri explains that the exoskeletons she is working on during her internship at Myomo help “people who have survived a stroke or have some neurological disease and can no longer move their arms themselves.” Patients who are fitted with exoskeletons during the rehabilitation process, can gain more force in their movements because the device moves when the patient moves. It does this by sensing signals in the patient’s muscles when they try to move. According to Jebri, being able to help create technology that can positively affect someone’s life is “pretty cool stuff.”