In partnership with the Vanderbilt University Center for Intelligent Mechatronics, Freedom Innovations will develop and commercialize the first prosthetic leg and ankle appliance controlled by the human mind.
A traditional mechanical leg and ankle prosthesis can only either dissipate or store mechanical energy. However, it cannot provide an amputee with net power during a gait cycle.
For this reason, amputees experience as much as three times the hip power and torque that a healthy person experiences. Amputees also expend 60 percent more metabolic energy than healthy patients during level walking.
By creating a prosthesis with actively powered knee and ankle joints, Vanderbilt researchers eliminated the biomechanical disparity between the human leg and a prosthesis experienced during level walking.
The team also added many previously impossible forms of locomotion including stair climbing, slope ascent and descent, walking on an uneven surface and walking at different cadences.
Vanderbilt extended exclusive worldwide licensing of its powered transfemoral prosthesis to Freedom Innovations. The first production run will deliver powered prostheses without neurological control systems.
However, thanks to a partnership with the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago (RIC), Freedom Innovations has released a prototype of a neurologically controlled Powered Leg. RIC recently published an article about the Powered Leg in the New England Journal of Medicine.
With "brain-steering" technology, the Powered Leg's accuracy cuts the risk of falls to 1.8 percent. For amputees with standard robotic prostheses, the risk of falls is 12.9 percent.
"We will soon be able to provide amputees with functional limbs they can control that will be even more user-friendly, smaller, quieter and more mobile than the prototypes used in the RIC study," said Maynard Carkhuff, president and CEO of Freedom Innovations.
When Freedom Innovations perfects the neurologically controlled Powered Leg, it plans to add the product to its current catalog of lower extremity prosthetic devices. The company has not provided a timeframe for the Powered Leg release.
Edited by
Alisen Downey
