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 Diego, the first ReAble Labs hand. The hand is a render; the habit reading is real.
Round 1 of 5
Sealed: sealing.
Cheat mode. Diego can see your throw.
The game needs JavaScript. Diego will wait.
Diego's read
Nothing yet. Throw something.
Every round, Diego says what it expected you to throw, and why.
How readable you are
Not yet.
Diego keeps count once it has a hunch about you.
Seal in full: sealing, the SHA-256 of Diego's throw, its read and a random nonce. All time: you 0, Diego 0, draws 0.
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