Amos Winter, PhD, an assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), has received a $500,000 grant from the National Science Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program. He received the five-year award for his project, “Tuning Passive Prosthetic Leg Dynamics to Create Low-cost, Robust Devices That Can Replicate Physiological Gait in Multiple Activities of Daily Living.”
Winter is also the director of the MIT Global Engineering and Research (GEAR) Lab, which focuses on the marriage of mechanical design theory and user-centered product design to create simple, elegant technological solutions for use in highly constrained environments. The aim of this CAREER project is to characterize the dynamics of prosthetic legs that utilize only passive mechanical elements (e.g., no motors or electronic controllers) such that it is possible to tune their performance to generate desired walking behavior in multiple activities of daily living. The project focuses on transfemoral prostheses. The goal is to understand how prosthetic dynamics vary based on the mass, geometry, and stiffness of the components of a passive prosthesis and how these can be varied to accurately replicate able-bodied walking, thus correlating the mechanical design of prosthetic legs to the biomechanical performance they induce. The ultimate goal is to design high-performance, low-cost prosthetic limbs that enhance the mobility and quality of life for people with lower-limb amputation in developing countries, while providing a cost-effective option with enhanced function for users of passive prostheses in developed countries.
