Seán Barrett
Founder and engineer from Cork. I build robot hands at ReAble Labs, where I'm co-founder, CEO and CTO.
Grip open
Pluck the strings, or grab the name. Simulated signal. No muscles were harmed.
- ReAble Labs
- A robotics company in Cork. I co-founded it in September 2025.
- Diego
- Our first hand. A myoelectric prosthetic, priced at €5,000. Patent filed.
- Hult Prize
- Irish National Final winners in 2026. Then top 21 of roughly 18,000 teams.
- Research
- Lead author of a preprint on surface EMG grasp decoding.
What I do
I do the mechanical design, the electronics, the PCBs, the firmware and the machine learning. Somebody has to.
In practice that is two jobs: running ReAble Labs, and doing all of its engineering.
The company
ReAble Labs builds robot hands. The first one is Diego. It costs €5,000.
Diego is a myoelectric prosthetic hand. Patent filed. We're in Cork, and William Hartley and I founded the company in September 2025.
How a hand listens to a muscle
Hand: open
A muscle that works harder makes a bigger, noisier electrical signal. Flip the negative half up (rectify it), smooth it into an envelope, and compare that with a threshold. Above it, the hand closes. That is the basic idea behind how a myoelectric hand is controlled.
Simulated signal. The general idea only, not how any particular hand does it.
The preprint goes further, on decoding grasps from surface EMG.
Research
A Leak-Safe Within-User Benchmark for Compact Surface-EMG Grasp Decoding, with a Causal Sequence-Reasoning Decoder
Lead author, with William Hartley. Preprints.org, .
A stricter, more honest way to test muscle signal decoders for prosthetic hands, and a decoder small enough for a microcontroller.
Best of five
Five rounds against the decoder. It commits to its move before you pick and shows you a fingerprint of it, so you can check it played fair.
Cheat mode: the decoder can see your move.
The game needs JavaScript. Keys R, P and S work too.
Latest
Press
'I'm developing a 3D-printed powered prosthetic hand...here's my advice to students with an idea'
Echo Live, my article in Cork ViewsReAble Labs, Co-Founded by MTU Student, Wins Prestigious Hult Prize Ireland 2026 for Innovative Prosthetics Venture
Munster Technological UniversityWe won the Hult Prize Irish National Final
ReAble Labs