Birmingham FES project to improve life for amputees

The researchers hope to meet currently unmet needs of amputees through their new assistive technology, with potential benefits to include improved function, pain management and mitigated risk of complications.

“Annually, there are more than one million amputations worldwide as a result of vascular diseases, trauma and cancer,” said principal investigator Dr Ziyun Ding, from Birmingham’s Department of Mechanical Engineering.

“With the increasing rate of diabetes and the population ageing, the amputee population is expected to double by 2050. A major limb amputation inevitably impairs mobility. In addition, amputees may suffer from chronic pain and the loss of muscle mass, which altogether in turn will [further diminish] their mobility.”

Ding described the team’s approach to using FES — a device to deliver small amounts of electrical current to muscles, providing additional amounts of muscle excitations for fulfilling functional tasks — as ‘ground-breaking’. 

It involves maintaining a computational musculoskeletal model of the body to predict an optimal solution for amputees, she explained, which could prescribe the values of unknowns such as which muscles to stimulate, the amount and the timing of stimulation in a functional task.