Washington, Sep 16 (Inditop.com) Marjorie Brasier, on an instrumented prosthetic leg, repeatedly tripped or slipped on the treadmill. Sometimes she recovered on her own and kept walking, while at other times the harness she wore was all that kept her from tumbling to the floor.
Brasier’s trips and slips occurred by design as part of a University of Rhode Island (URI) research study that seeks to improve the safety of prosthetic legs by developing a reliable and responsive stumble detection system.
One of six clients of Nunnery Orthotic and Prosthetic Technologies to participate in the study, Brasier was hooked up to dozens of electrodes, and wore shoes containing 99 pressure sensors.
The 40 light-reflective markers on her body were tracked by eight cameras surrounding the room to collect the data necessary for the research.
“When we become unbalanced, our neural system reacts quickly and sends a signal to help us recover,” said Helen Huang, assistant professor of biomedical engineering at URI.
“Our challenge is to see if we can detect these neural reactions fast enough to activate a mechanism in a patient’s prosthetic leg to stabilise them before they fall.”
During the experimental phase of the study, Huang is collecting data from able-bodied individuals and those using prosthetic legs to determine what kind of physiological signals can be detected for use in developing a stumble detection system.
Once she has analysed the data, she hopes to develop an algorithm that can be used in computer-controlled artificial limbs to provide active stumble recovery.
“If we can detect the stumble reaction fast enough, then there may be time to react to it,” said Huang, who is collaborating on the project with Susan D’Andrea, Brown University assistant professor, according to an URI release.
