Taking on a hiking trail or a cobblestone street with a prosthetic leg is a risky proposition – it’s possible, but even in relatively easy terrain, people who use prostheses to walk are more likely to fall than others.
Taking on a hiking trail or a cobblestone street with a prosthetic leg is a risky proposition – it’s possible, but even in relatively easy terrain, people who use prostheses to walk are more likely to fall than others. Now, Stanford University mechanical engineers have developed a more stable prosthetic leg – and a better way of designing them – that could make challenging terrain more manageable for people who have lost a lower leg.
The cornerstone of the new design is a kind of tripod foot that responds to rough terrain by actively shifting pressure between three different contact points. As important as the foot is a tool the team developed for quickly emulating and improving their prototypes.
“Prosthetic emulators allow us to try lots of different designs without the overhead of new hardware,” said Steven Collins, an associate professor of mechanical engineering and a member of Stanford Bio-X. “Basically, we can try any kind of crazy design ideas we might have and see how people respond to them,” he said, without having to build each idea separately, an effort that can take months or years for each different design.
Read more at Stanford University
