Prosthetics

Paul Slaughter knew early on he wanted an engineering degree that would help amputees, even writing in a high school career essay about designing prosthetics to assist athletes. The mechanical engineering graduate student recently got that opportunity when he designed a prosthetic leg for Army veteran Kelly Elmlinger to compete in triathlons, including a World Triathlon Para Series event where Elmlinger used the leg to help come in first place. Read More

Andrés Martínez strode briskly on the treadmill, staring straight ahead and counting backwards by seven from 898, a trick to keep his brain from anticipating the literal stumbling block heading his way: a compact 35 pounds of steel specifically designed to make him fall. Special goggles kept him from looking down. Arrows on an eye-level... Read More

The automatic stumble response, so natural for most people, is virtually impossible for those who use prosthetic legs, simply because even state-of-the-art prosthetics cannot adapt to stumbling. Read More

The device is from the lab of Professor Michael Goldfarb, perhaps best known for working on a bionic leg with shark attack victim Craig Hutto and later developing the Indego exoskeleton. Read More

In his effort to develop better prosthetic limbs, Karl Zelik had to start with deciphering more clearly how muscles function in walking. His path not only led to a better way of quantifying human locomotion, but also to the discovery that muscles around the hip and in the foot are more important to walking than previously thought. Read More

The prosthetics research of Michael Goldfarb is featured in "The NBIB Bionic Man," an interactive web tool that helps students and the public learn about innovative federally-funded biomedical research. Read More

Recent advances in robotics technology make it possible to create prosthetics that can duplicate the natural movement of human legs which promises to dramatically improve the mobility of lower-limb amputees. Read More

In the foreseeable future, robots will be sticking steerable needles in your brain to remove blood clots; capsule robots will be crawling up your colon as a painless replacement for the colonoscopy; and ultra-miniaturized snake robots will remove tumors from your bladder and other body cavities. Read More

Within the next one to three years, "bionic" prosthetic devices will become available for the people whose limbs were amputated in the Boston Marathon bombing that are substantially smarter, more capable, more active and more interactive than those currently on the market. Read More

An amputee using a prosthetic leg designed at Vanderbilt made history by climbing 103 flights of stairs to the top of a Chicago skyscraper. Read More

Two mechanical engineering graduate students and their professor have received the Wyss Institute-IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society Award for Translational Research for their work on a robotic leg prosthesis, selected from submissions by biomedical engineers and scientists from academic institutions worldwide. Read More

Two years after losing his leg in a shark attack, Craig Hutto became the test pilot for a unique and powerful new prosthetic leg being developed by mechanical engineer Michael Goldfarb and his team at Vanderbilt University. Read More

Last week when the Nashville Scene’s annual Innovations Issue hit the newsstands, three of its ten “forward-thinking ideas that are pushing Nashville – and the world – into the future” came from Vanderbilt. The three campus projects that impressed the Scene editors were: Digging for Drugs:… Read More

A new lower-limb prosthetic uses the latest advances in computer, sensor, electric motor and battery technology to give it bionic capabilities. Read More

A shark attack leads to a collaboration that could transform the lives of amputees This is the last snapshot taken of Craig Hutto before a shark attack claimed his leg on June 27, 2005. Photo provided by Craig Hutto It was an overcast June morning at Cap San Blas, Fla.,… Read More

Anita Mahadevan-Jansen, Duco Jansen and Peter Konrad Using beams of light to allow amputees not only to control but also to feel the movement of prosthetic limbs is the ambitious goal of a new $5.6 million Department of Defense initiative. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is tapping the… Read More