Existing scoliosis braces preclude spinal movement for activities of daily living, which reduces the willingness to wear the brace and treatment success. This work develops a scoliosis brace that meets corrective requirements while retaining patient mobility.
The primary compliance vector (PCV) captures the predominant kinematic degree of freedom of a mechanism. Its path describes large deformation mechanism behavior. This work presents a general framework that optimizes the PCV path of compliant shell mechanisms. It refines mechanism shape to satisfy kinematic requirements.
This work designs a shell mechanism that circumferences the human torso, that allows for sagittal bending, and transmits corrective forces. The optimization framework refines this mechanism to align the PCV with the sagittal bending axis of the human spine.

Compliant shell mechanisms utilize spatially curved thin-walled structures to transfer or transmit force, motion or energy through elastic deformation. To design with spatial mechanisms designers need non-linear characterization methods. This work introduces a comprehensive non-linear characterization method and framework which is experimentally validated and applied on promising shell mechanisms, with the objective to enhance the design process of a compliant scoliosis brace.