The College Park Industries, Fraser, Michigan, iPecs™ device has been named the winner of the electronics category in the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) 2011 Create the Future design contest, which was launched in 2002 by the publishers of the NASA Tech Briefs magazine to help stimulate and reward engineering innovation.
The iPecs (Intelligent Prosthetic Endo-Skeletal Component System) is a device that provides researchers with a tool to measure human locomotion or gait parameters on users of lower-limb prostheses. It measures forces and torsion-moments that can be wirelessly transmitted in real time to a computer interface. Research conducted with the iPecs will be used to develop clinical algorithms to facilitate and document prosthetic component selection and alignment.
The iPecs project has been funded by a small business innovation research (SBIR) grant 1R43HD059285-01 titled “Universal Prosthetic Monitoring System for Outcome Based Research and Clinical Application” funded by the National Institute of Health (NIH) Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.
The iPecs is currently available for gait lab researchers; a clinical version will be available in early 2012.
