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BOSTON: MIT scientists have developed an inexpensive prosthetic foot that they believe can be customized according to the size and weight of an individual, and affordable for rural people in India and other developing countries. Prosthetic technology has progressed by leaps and bounds, providing amputees with a range of bionic options, including artificial knees controlled by microchips, artificial intelligence loaded sensors and robotic hands that can be used in a variety of ways. a user can manipulate with his mind. However, such high-tech designs can cost tens of thousands of dollars, making them inaccessible to many amputees, especially in developing countries.
Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have developed a passive prosthesis. foot, that they can adapt to an individual.
Given the body weight and size of a user, researchers can adjust the shape and stiffness of the prosthetic foot, so that they feel that the foot, if it is made on a large scale, could cost less than existing products
"Walking is something as basic for us as walking. humans, and for this segment of the population that has a lower limb amputation, there is no theory to tell us: "Here's exactly how we should design the rigidity and geometry of a foot for you, so that you would march as "In 1965, shortly after the arrival of Mr. Winter at the faculty of MIT, he was approached by Jaipur Foot, a manufacturer of artificial limbs based in Jaipur, India
. The organization manufactures a passive prosthetic foot, intended for amputees in developing countries, and donates more than 28,000 models each year to users in India and elsewhere.
"They have been doing this for over 40 years, and it is robust.Farmers can use it barefoot on the outside, and it's relatively l As if people were going in a mosque and wanted to pray barefoot, they were not likely to be stigmatized, "says Winter.
" But it's pretty heavy and the internal structure is handmade, which "Winter has stated:
The organization asked Winter if he could design a better, lighter foot, which could be mass-produced at low cost.
The team asked first looked for a way to quantitatively measure, linking the mechanical characteristics of a prosthesis to the walking performance of a user – a fundamental relationship that had never been completely codified.
Instead to design a prosthetic foot to replicate the movements of a valid foot, the researchers sought design a prosthetic foot that would produce lower leg movements similar to those of the lower leg of & # 39; a physically fit person to walk.
"We can potentially dramatically change the foot, as long as we make the lower leg do what we want it to do, in terms of kinematics and load The researchers have developed a mathematical model of a single and passive prosthetic foot, which describes the stiffness, possible movement and shape of the foot
. Model the ground reaction forces of the dataset, that they could summarize to predict how the a user's lower leg would translate into a single step.
With their model, they then adjusted the rigidity and geometry of the simulated prosthetic foot to produce a lower leg trajectory that was close to the swing-valid – a measure that they consider to be a minimal error of lower leg trajectory.
"To identify an ideal foot shape, the group ran a" genetic algorithm "- a technical common used to eliminate unfavorable options, in search of the most optimal designs.
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