Blatchford, headquartered in Basingstoke, England, has been awarded the MacRobert Award by the Royal Academy of Engineering for its Linx prosthetic limb. The Linx technology allows information to be shared continuously between the knee and foot to adapt automatically to changing terrains and circumstances, which can improve the user’s confidence and stability. The Linx development team, comprising Saeed Zahedi, OBE, FREng; David Moser, PhD; Nadine Stech; Rob Painter; and Andy Sykes, attended the award ceremony on June 23 and collected the gold medal and a £50,000 cash prize.
Established in 1969, the MacRobert Award is the United Kingdom’s longest running and most prestigious national prize for engineering, according to the Royal Academy of Engineering website.
“I am delighted that we have been selected as the winner of the 2016 MacRobert Award for Innovation in Engineering,” said Stephen Blatchford, executive chairman of Blatchford. “This is the premier engineering award to win, and it is a tremendous testament to all of the innovation, hard work, and effort that has gone into producing the Linx integrated limb system by all of the engineers working on the project.”
The team also won a British Healthcare Trade Association (BHTA) Product Innovation award for the Linx in 2015.
