Rewired Bionics

Meeting Time

Monday 3:05PM

Project description

According to the Amputee Coalition, there are about 2 million people living with limb loss currently in the United States. Most health insurances have an annual limit patients can spend on devices which causes many patients unable to afford the high-tech functional prosthetics that can range anywhere from $10,000-$50,000 not including repairs or modifications. With the ever increasing price of functional prosthetics, we wanted to create affordable prosthetics that would be available to a lower-income population. For this reason, we decided to work on a loss cost alternative that would provide a person the opportunity to interact with and use a much more affordable prosthetic that would still allow them the basic functions they had lost. One such person is Tara Ojos, who was born without the lower part of her arm. She has grown all her life without her lower forearm and she is now in her twenties who has never been able to afford a prosthetic. We want to help thousands of people like Tara, people who have a vascular disease, people who have gone through horrendous accidents, people who have served overseas and fought for our protection and security, so we have decided to build our first prosthetic for her.

Our proposed solution is to build a myoelectric prosthetic for a patient that is an elbow-down amputee to provide a cost-effective, comfortable and easy to use device. We are in the process of iterating through our second version of the prosthetic. The focus this semester is to get a working prototype, which entails interfacing sensor data collection, sensor to motor communication and prosthetic stress testing.