Vessl Prosthetics, a startup founded at Western University, Canada, will begin user testing of its automatically adjustable socket. The socket design aims to distribute pressure around the residual limb to better manage volume fluctuations. Western University engineering professor Emily Lalone, PhD, and her team will be conducting the studies and socket testing with the company.
Vessl Prosthetics was founded by Sydney Robinson, CEO, and Oleksiy Zaika, COO, who met as students at the Western Medical Innovation Fellowship program, offered through WORLDiscoveries, to immerse young scientists and engineers in clinical environments to identify unmet clinical needs. Their team was assigned to observe a diabetes clinic where they learned about prosthetic devices and poor socket fit.
“We met a lot of amputees who were all struggling with their socket not fitting because their leg would fluctuate in size throughout their day,” Robinson said. “This seemed like an archaic problem. We first thought surely someone had come up with something better than this. But the research shows they haven’t found a solution that’s widely accessible and clinically feasible. It’s an underserved—and under researched—population. There are a lot of really qualified experts in the research area of prosthetics, but it’s only just picking up momentum. It doesn’t have the history of research like other fields do.”
Their socket design attracted early interest and support. By the time they graduated from the fellowship program last June, they’d made their first pitch, winning $25,000 at the 2022 Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center’s Innovation Competition hosted by Western’s Bone and Joint Institute and the Morrissette Institute for Entrepreneurship.
Vessl Prosthetics has since been accepted into the Velocity venture-ready program at the University of Waterloo, the Western accelerator program, and are currently housed at the BioNext incubator at Robarts Research Institute. Most recently, the company attracted financial support and expert advice through the Idea Fund, a strategic initiative offered through Canada’s TechAlliance. The initiative also offers mentorship and networking opportunities. WORLDiscoveries is helping Robinson and Zaika bridge the gap between academia and industry, providing access to market research, industry connections, and intellectual property.
“We don’t care how we’re going to solve the problem. If this design doesn’t work, that’s fine, we’ll just start again,” Robinson said. “Sometimes people develop something for so long it becomes their baby, and if it doesn’t fit that problem, they’re going to make it fit ‘some problem,’ whereas we keep the focus on the problem itself.”
Editor’s note: This story was adapted from materials provided by Western University.
