Originally published August 15 2005
Chip technology makes prosthetic legs easier to use
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
Researchers have developed a new way to make the lives of amputees better by outfitting their prosthetic legs with chip technology to take some of the effort out of walking.
That hasn't been the case with artificial limbs, which have long required wearers to put a lot of thought and effort into a simple stride.
The C-Leg is a decidedly 21st-century device, with a microprocessor in the knee that reads data 50 times a second--from real-time sensor data--to help the wearer negotiate changing terrain.
Bert Harman, president and CEO of Otto Bock's Americas region, recently spoke with CNET News.com about R&D challenges, getting nerves to talk to prosthetics and the current state of bionics.
Q: How big a business is high-tech prosthetics, and what is Otto Bock's part of that business?
Harman: Well, if you start as high-tech prosthetics, it's relatively small.
In fact the whole prosthetics industry is a small industry.
It's not like we're making cell phones or calculators where you just continue to drop the price down because of volume.
Electronics and composite materials and all the things that make up high tech today have been around for a long time, but it's only been in the last five to 10 years it was applied into this portion of the business.
In a traditional drug study, a drug company might study 5,000 patients or more, and if we do a C-Leg study, we're lucky to get 20 patients.
To give you an example, the C-Leg in the United States is a product that is generally recommended for mid- to high-active patients, and there are only about 8,000 of those a year that would be an above-the-knee, active amputee.
A $40,000 device would include all the components; the socket, which has the interface between the residual (limb) and the componentry; and the prosthetist's time.
While (those devices) didn't use chip technology, they did use micro motors and batteries and power supplies and electrodes, so that was kind of a frontrunner.
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