We’re excited to bring Series 6 of Clinician Insights with our guest Professor Alex Dickinson, academic co-founder of Radii Devices and Professor of Prosthetics Engineering at the University of Southampton. Since 2013, Alex has led pioneering research into the biomechanics and design of prosthetic limbs and serves as Technology Lead for the People Powered Prosthetics research group.
In this first episode, we talk with Alex about the academic roots of innovation in O&P, and the unique value of research partnerships between universities and clinical practitioners.
If you’re new here, Clinician Insights is brought to you by Radii Devices, opening up conversations about digital technology and its role in clinical practice. We hope you enjoy this episode—don’t forget to subscribe on Substack to never miss an installment.
Let’s begin our conversation with Alex.
Emilie: Thank you so much for joining us, Alex. Could you begin by telling us a bit about your academic career and your work in O&P?
Alex: Thanks for having me. I originally got into this through Orthopaedics. I was doing a Knowledge Transfer Partnership (UK government funded university-industry collaboration) and a PhD designing hip resurfacing implants, trying to predict how the body would respond to implantation with a very stiff artificial joint, and how we could make it strong enough.
I started the PhD aiming to go into industry—to do research that would benefit patients, not just for academic purposes. But over time, I realised I could still make a real-world impact while staying in academia.
My PhD examiner was active in prosthetics, and in discussion of my thesis we found ways to apply the simulation methods I had developed to prosthetics, and started applying for funding.
Emilie: That’s great. How does digital technology fit into that? Has your research focused much on digital tools?
Alex: Yes, and it started through collaboration with Professor Pete Worsley. W e did our PhDs around the same time and got some early funding from the university to explore smartphone scanning technology, around 2013.
We thought it was a new idea—replacing plaster casting with digital scans—but we soon realised we were a couple of decades late. CAD/CAM foundations date back to the early 1980s.
Emilie: Wow, so not as new as we might think.
Alex: Exactly. Those early researchers were already proposing brilliant ideas. But the tech just wasn’t advanced enough to realise them. Now, with high-performance computing, large and high resolution datasets, and 3D scanners in our pockets, we can actually do what they imagined. Back then, even scanning was mechanical—styluses tracing limb shapes. Now it’s optical and mobile.
Emilie: So, what happened in the gap between the 80s and now? Was there much investment in research?
Alex: There were some great publications in the 80s and early 90s which we reviewed while preparing reports on our recent research, we’ve gone back and reviewed them. People were already assessing digital sockets not just in terms of patient outcomes, but also visit time, modifications, and even health economics compared to conventional methods.
Our first study with Pete came from a realisation: digital tools were being advertised in journals, but no one was publishing validation studies. Coming from Orthopaedics, that surprised me—nothing in clinical use would be accepted without accuracy and repeatability data.
So, we did a study scanning casts multiple times to assess accuracy. We also did a statistical shape model study to automatically detect limb characteristics.
We submitted both to the ISPO World Congress in 2015, expecting the stats paper to be more popular. But it was the scanner accuracy paper that got a podium presentation. That caught clinicians’ attention and led to further collaboration, including with Opcare, a major provider of prosthetics in the UK.
Emilie: That’s amazing!
Alex: Yes, what we thought was a simple validation study actually laid the foundation for a decade of work. The community wasn’t ready for the statistical side then, but the clinical focus on validation made a real impact. We didn’t really have a compelling use for the statistical shape model paper at the time it was published, but I’m excited that now, 10 years later, we are going back to the ISPO congress with results of our clinical assessment that uses it as part of a socket design decision support tool .
Emilie: That’s so interesting—thank you, Alex. Let’s pause there and pick up the conversation in Episode Two.
Thank you to Alex for his insights so far!
We hope this episode with Alex offered valuable reflections and fresh perspectives on the industry. In the next instalment, we dive deeper into the relationship between current research and clinical adoption of technology, and the future of training and academics in O&P.
If you have thoughts, experiences, or questions to share, we’d love to hear them — you can get in touch via our website here.
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