Artificial foot recycles energy

Co-developer of the artificial foot, Art Kuo, a biomedical engineering professor at the University of Michigan, explained that, when trying to walk normally, amputees experience what a healthy person would feel if they were carrying an extra 13kg.

The artificial-foot prototype, compared to conventional prosthetic feet, significantly cuts the energy spent per step.

The human walking gait naturally wastes energy as each foot collides with the ground in between steps.

A typical prosthesis doesn’t reproduce the force a living ankle exerts to push off of the ground. As a result, the researchers found that test subjects spent 23 per cent more energy walking with a conventional prosthetic foot, compared with walking naturally.

To see how stepping with their device compared with normal walking, Kuo and his engineering team conducted their experiments with non-amputees wearing a rigid boot and prosthetic simulator.

With the energy-recycling foot, a microcontroller was used to release wasted walking energy at the exact moment power was need to push the ankle.