Saeed_Zahedi

I think London Paralympic legacy showed the world that amputees can run a 100 meters faster than most of us can. Can they do it under 10s? my personal view is yes. But most of it is motivation, although hardware plays a part (Energy absorption & return and stride)!!
But beyond speed, naturally evolved human limbs are very hard to beat. The two legged person in actual fact is a perfect wheel, consuming the least energy to go from a to b.

Obviously you are one of us! Machine Learning is the focus of IR4 (Industrial revolution 4 or Industry 4.0) that is the key for many future engineering developments. The application of AI and machine learning is already being experimented with sensors as input which are applied to the socket interface. This is a critical area in lower limb prosthetic, the holy grail. Naturally most R&D engineers are thinking of how to solve the issues of every individual being different and every residual limb after amputation being different. Then there are changes in volume during the day pending on variation of activities. All these variation are the Perfect problem and scenario for machine learning to solve.

Legs move like a pendulum. and at one end connected the body which powers it by bending and straightening. That makes you go forward. The end result is like wheel. You can watch people walking from the side and if you really watch you can see the wheel turning with every time your foot hits the floor and then it takes off. A prosthetic limb is trying to copy this function to create the motion. At present our brain sends signals to the residual leftover part of the leg. When the user wants to walk this sets the limb into motion. In future this could be directly connected to the nerves.

I am sorry to hear about your pain, and hope it gets better. We have not worked on upper limb for several decades, but other designers and manufacturers of artificial limb do work on upper limb and they have made fantastic developments for those who lost their limbs. In my view technology has a lot further to go. Every case of injured limbs are root causes are usually different, If it was me, I would keep working with my Doctor and look for solutions to keep the natural limbs and reduce the pain.

I guess we are lucky at Blatchford, as we also look after over 20000 patients, so access to users is easier for us. I am your studies will find its benefit in future development in this area. Please keep up the work and publish! (make sure you patent novel ideas/concepts)