KAIST develops self-dressing robotic garment for elderly, disabled users

Researchers have developed a robotic clothing technology that helps elderly people, people with disabilities and rehabilitation patients who have difficulty moving their arms freely or maintaining their balance dress themselves independently.

The key innovation is not a robot that dresses the user, but a garment that unfolds along the contours of the wearer's body on its own, guiding itself into place.

KAIST announced Monday that a research team led by Professor Yoo Ji-hwan of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering won the IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters best paper award for the second consecutive year at the 2026 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, the world's largest robotics academic conference.

The team developed what they call a self-dressing adaptive garment — a technology that uses soft robotics to allow clothing to unfold over a user's body and assist with dressing without external robotic devices.

Conventional dressing-assistance technologies have typically relied on complex actuation and control by external robotic systems, or have restricted the user's movement and posture. The team instead applied the pneumatic deployment mechanism at the core of soft growing robots — flexible robots that extend and advance by inflating internal structures, much like a plant growing — directly into the garment's structure, allowing the clothing itself to unfold smoothly along the user's body with no external robot required.

When air is pumped in, the garment's internal structure deploys forward along the body, allowing the clothing to wrap naturally around the user's arms or legs. Rather than the person pushing their limbs into the garment, the garment advances toward the body and assists with dressing.

The team built prototypes in several garment forms — including sleeves, jackets and trousers — and verified their self-dressing performance through experiments. The garments deployed stably along the user's body and reduced both the physical effort required during dressing and the forces exerted on the body, confirming that safe dressing assistance is achievable.

"This technology can help users with limited arm or leg movement — such as elderly people, people with disabilities and rehabilitation patients — dress more independently," Yoo said. "We expect it to find broad applications in wearable robotics, rehabilitation engineering and human-robot interaction."