Throughout his childhood, Bradley Scott Wagman (MDE ’26) saw family members face significant physical challenges that hindered their walking. His grandmother, who had multiple sclerosis, was in a wheelchair for as long as he can remember. Years later, Wagman watched his mother suffer from severe arthritis and use the same devices his grandma had depended on decades earlier.
After high school, Wagman joined the U.S. Army as an airborne engineer. During his four years of service, he saw soldiers get injured and seek out mobility devices. This experience made him reflect on how little mobility devices had changed since his childhood and also consider what it would take to design new types of products in this category. Then, when Wagman decided to attend Savannah College of Art and Design for industrial design, he started interviewing people who depended on ankle braces every day, such as stroke survivors, people with MS, and others navigating mobility decline. What he heard surprised him.
"There's this extreme stigma around wearing braces in public," Wagman recalled as a common theme from the interviews. "That was leading people either to not wear the brace and suffer physically or wear it but have it negatively affect their mental health.”
One conversation that stuck with him was with a man who had to wear a large ankle-foot orthosis. He told Wagman he wanted to work in business, but thought, “How is anyone going to take me seriously now?”
These early interviews led Wagman to found Sole 1, a venture focused on developing a new type of mobility device.
From a Better Brace to No Brace at All
Wagman's first attempt at making a mobility device was for his senior thesis at SCAD. He created a brace that looked nicer, thinking people would be proud to show it off rather than hide it.
Quickly, he realized that even a better-looking brace wasn’t going to cut it.
After getting feedback from people who would potentially wear his product, Wagman remembered thinking: "I didn't innovate anything; I just made a better-looking brace. But for the people who need it, it's still a brace." Wagman recalled a common refrain in his conversations with potential customers: “People would say, ‘I just want to wear my Nikes again. Instead of ugly loafers, specialized footwear, or buying one shoe at a time, I want to feel normal getting dressed in the morning.’”
This feedback led Wagman to examine how he might enable people to wear the shoes that they wore before they needed a brace. “That’s where the sock idea came from,” he said.
Leading with Comfort and Aesthetics
After finishing his undergraduate degree, Wagman was accepted into the Master’s in Design Engineering program at Harvard, a joint degree between the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and the Harvard Graduate School of Design. He wanted to keep developing mobility devices to help people walk and hoped this degree would help him learn the robotics, design, and business skills he’d need to start a company.
In a fall robotics class, Wagman met an undergraduate engineering student, Viktor Bokisch ’26, who would become the co-founder of Sole 1. In considering their design approach for the Sole 1 sock, Wagman and Bokisch agreed to turn a common engineering principle on its head. Wagman explained, "Generally, you go from engineering for performance to comfort, but we decided to start with comfort and work towards performance.”
Arriving at their first prototype took relentless iteration. Wagman and Bokisch worked on designing and 3D printing numerous designs. In sharing one of their greatest challenges, Wagman explained the complexities of working with “shape memory alloy,” a material that changes shape based on temperature. It required building a complex software controller from scratch, which took months longer than expected.
"There was not really a roadmap," Wagman explained. "Viktor and I felt like we were on an island a lot of the time. Every day, we were just trying to come up with a new way to make it work."
Listening to Prospective Customer Feedback
In 2025, Wagman and Bokisch took the Sole 1 sock to the Abilities Expo, the nation’s leading event for the disability community, to engage with and provide feedback on new products and services. Wagman recalled that while attendees liked the idea, they thought the prototype looked like an ankle monitor. For a company whose singular goal is to eliminate stigma, the feedback couldn’t be ignored. He said, “We wanted to create something that people really want to wear and can wear with everything — like their Nikes. We want to change the cultural zeitgeist around mobility products."
In deciding how to address this issue of aesthetics, Wagman and Bokisch explored designing a removable, snap-on node that aimed to be both low profile and effective. Sensors would track the wearer's ankle joint angle as they walk, and machine learning models would optimize for toe clearance and stability. According to Wagman, this approach provides “just enough assistance during the swing phase of a step” to keep someone's toes from catching as well as lateral support for when they're standing.
After months of additional prototyping, they arrived at a product they were happy with and arranged a pilot with 18 people whose mobility issues stem from stroke, spinal cord injury, MS, and Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease. Wagman shared they saw an over 80% improvement in ankle angle across pilot participants with paralysis in dorsiflexion. This meant that the sock was powerful and accurate enough to lift their feet as they walked. Sole 1 earned a James Dyson Award for its innovation.
Making the Most of Harvard
In sharing his experience at Harvard, Wagman described the Harvard MDE program as "a build-your-own-adventure degree." Having already trained as a designer as an undergraduate, he decided to focus more on technical courses at SEAS as well as business courses at Harvard Business School. Over two years, he took everything from Entrepreneurial Finance to Tough Tech Ventures to Innovating in Health Care.
He also accessed many resources at the Harvard Innovation Labs, booking office hours with advisors to pressure-test his ideas and competing in the Harvard President’s Innovation Challenge. Sole 1 was selected as one of 25 PIC finalists from more than 400 applicants.
In reflecting on the resource he found most valuable from across his degree program and i-lab participation, Wagman shared how incredible it is to be part of the Harvard community.
"You don't get the same level of conversation anywhere else," he said. "I'm like, ‘Hey, I'm working on this thing where I'm not syncing up my sensors, my IMU is reading this crazy wacky angle,’ and someone literally anywhere around you can look at your code and be like, ‘Oh yeah.’ It's a crazy place to be."
Closing the Mobility Gap for Everyone
The Sole 1 team is finishing development of its electrical hardware and knit design this summer, with their next test product targeted for completion by end of summer. After that, they plan on doing pilot tests through the spring of 2027.
When Sole 1 launches its commercially available sock in the coming years, it will be as a wellness product aimed at the general aging population. Wagman shared that falls are already the number one cause of injury-related ER visits for adults over 65. He aims to offer the product at a consumer-friendly price that is far less than the many thousands of dollars people spend on exoskeleton devices or custom-made braces.
"The mission of the company is really to help everyone possible," he says, "and to change the idea of what medical devices are."
