From Rehab to Play, From Play to Progress.
What We Are Building
ReNUSHU is a student-led design and research project at Carnegie Mellon University’s Entertainment Technology Center, developed in partnership with Magnes AG, the creator of NuShu smart shoes. Our goal is simple but ambitious:
to turn physical therapy from a repetitive medical routine into a motivating, game-driven journey that patients want to return to.
At its core, ReNUSHU is designed as a flexible foundation rather than a single fixed solution. The project explores how smart-shoe sensing, adaptive exergames, and PT-facing tools can work together to support different movements, therapeutic goals, and user needs over time.
Our current exploration of this direction takes shape through a prototype experience called Camp Movewell.
Introducing Camp Movewell
Camp Movewell is not a single game, but a growing collection of small, focused exergames powered by NuShu smart shoes. Each mini-game is built around a specific physical therapy movement, such as heel raises, reactive stepping, or balance shifts, allowing therapeutic exercises to be broken down into clear, playable units.
This mini-game–based structure is central to Camp Movewell’s scalability. By treating each game as a self-contained system with its own goals, feedback, and difficulty curve, the experience can expand over time. New games can be added, exercises can be swapped or recombined, and therapeutic focus can shift without redesigning the entire system.
As a result, Camp Movewell functions both as a playable prototype and as an extensible framework, enabling ReNUSHU to explore how diverse rehabilitation movements can be translated into adaptable, game-based experiences across different clinical and research contexts.
Why NuShu Smart Shoes Matter
NuShu shoes are not an accessory to our project—they are the foundation that makes this design space possible.
Each shoe contains an accelerometer, gyroscope, and Magnes AG’s proprietary gait estimation algorithms, allowing the system to sense how a person steps, shifts weight, raises their heel, or balances in real time. This unlocks three key capabilities:
1. Natural, Intuitive Movement Input
Patients do not need cameras, controllers, or external trackers. They simply move, in the same way real physical therapy exercises require.
2. Clinically Meaningful Feedback
Therapists gain insight into movement quality, consistency, reaction timing, and change over time, not just whether a repetition was completed.
3. A New Design Space for Rehabilitation
For designers, NuShu enables games that feel playful while remaining biomechanically grounded, a balance that is difficult to achieve with conventional sensing approaches.
Without NuShu, Camp Movewell would just be a game.
With NuShu’s smart-shoe sensing, it becomes a system where real-world movement, clinical intent, and game design can meaningfully intersect.
Who Is This Project For
ReNUSHU is designed to be useful, extensible, and meaningful to different groups involved in rehabilitation, design, and research. Rather than targeting a single audience, the project intentionally creates space for multiple perspectives to intersect.
For clinicians and physical therapists,
ReNUSHU offers a way to observe movement quality beyond repetition counts, adjust exercise parameters in real time, and reflect on patient progress through clear, interpretable feedback. The system is shaped to support clinical reasoning rather than replace it.
For designers and researchers,
ReNUSHU functions as an open-ended framework and testbed. Through its modular, mini-game–based structure, the project enables exploration of how different therapeutic movements, feedback strategies, and difficulty curves can be translated into interactive systems, studied, and iterated upon over time.
For partners and future collaborators,
ReNUSHU represents a direction rather than a finished product. Its reliance on smart-shoe sensing and extensible game structures allows the system to be adapted, expanded, or recontextualized across new use cases, populations, and research questions.
Together, these perspectives position ReNUSHU not as a single solution, but as a platform for continued exploration at the intersection of movement, play, and care.
How Our Game Creates Value
Physical
Our activities are grounded in evidence-based physical therapy exercises that support strength, balance, mobility, and safe movement patterns.
Cognitive
Gameplay also challenges memory, reaction time, attention, and decision-making, encouraging whole-body and mind engagement rather than movement alone.
Together, these dimensions are intentionally designed to be modular. As new mini-games are introduced, ReNUSHU can emphasize different physical or cognitive goals, allowing the system to adapt to new patient populations, therapy stages, or research questions.
Why Our Approach Matters
Most commercial wearables stop at collecting data.
ReNUSHU goes a step further by connecting data to action, and action to motivation.
By combining NuShu’s precise gait tracking with progress-driven play and gentle feedback cues, we aim to create experiences that do not simply measure movement, but actively encourage it. This approach supports carryover from clinic to daily life by:
Our approach strengthens carry-over from clinic to daily life by:
- Providing playful motivation
- Offering real-time, meaningful feedback
- Reinforcing proper movement patterns
- Helping patients reconnect with their own progress
We are designing tools that make therapy feel less like a chore and more like a journey forward, while keeping clinical relevance at the center.
A Team Bridging Design and Practice
ReNUSHU is developed by an interdisciplinary ETC team applying game design methodology to rehabilitation, informed by:
- Academic research
- Physical therapy expertise
- Iterative testing with real patients and clinicians
This dual perspective allows us to balance clinical practicality with creative engagement. By grounding playful experimentation in real-world practice, ReNUSHU offers a framework that can be extended, adapted, and built upon by future designers, researchers, and clinicians.
By blending playful design with therapeutic intent, ReNUSHU moves beyond a single prototype and offers a framework for rethinking how rehabilitation can be designed, evaluated, and extended over time.