Clarkson University in NY works to develop new kind of prosthetic

From the Watertown Daily Times:

POTSDAM, N.Y. — If Clarkson University research goes well, someone with a prosthetic leg one day may be able to climb stairs as naturally as anyone else.

The university and Infotonics Technology Center, a Rochester company, have been awarded a $1.4 million grant from the Army to develop a prosthetic leg that uses sensors to move along with any remaining leg muscles, unlike current state-of-the-art prosthetic legs.

"They wouldn't enable an amputee to move using the prosthetic limb the way you or I would. They're useful in that they enable the amputee to walk across the flat ground," said Kevin B. Fite, mechanical and aeronautical engineering professor. "But there are a number of capabilities that aren't possible."

Most of the grant money is going to Infotonics, which will build the sensors after Clarkson has completed its research and development. The university is receiving about $400,000 of the Army's funds to design the system and test it out after it's built.

Prosthetic arms already available can do what Mr. Fite and his team are setting out to do, but the technology cannot simply be transferred to the lower extremities.

"It would be a robotic leg that behaves close to what an intact human limb can do," said the professor, who has been working on prosthetic limbs, though not necessarily sensors, for about three years. "The problem is how do you interface the new limb with the amputated one."

Problems arise in creating lower-extremity prosthetics in large part because legs are load-bearing. That affects how the sensors need to react when an amputee moves. Additionally, sweat builds up more quickly in the sockets that connect the sensors to the skin on a prosthetic leg than it does on an arm, according to Mr. Fite.

However, his team is not ready to begin worrying about how the sensors would work together to control a limb. The Army grant is only for the first year of research; to continue the work, Mr. Fite and his team will have to apply again for the funds, which will be awarded based on the availability of the money and the progress of the research.

"Quite a lot is left to go. We are just starting this," he said. "The first year is really in sensor-array development and doing clinical evaluations of the sensor. We've kind of been in the 'idea generation.'"