Research aims for improvements in powered prosthetics

New research examines exactly what happens when these technologies fail, with the goal of developing a new generation of more robust powered prostheses.

‘My work has focused on developing technology that translates electrical signals in human muscle into signals that control powered prosthetic limbs – such as decoding muscle signals to tell a prosthetic leg that it needs to walk forward or step up onto a staircase,’ said Dr Helen Huang, senior author of a paper on the work and an associate professor in the joint biomedical engineering program at North Carolina State University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

‘But sometimes this ‘decoding’ technology makes mistakes, such as thinking someone wants to climb a step when he doesn’t,’ said Fan Zhang, lead author of the paper and a Ph.D. student in the joint biomedical engineering program. ‘This is a problem, because we don’t want to put users at risk of stumbling or falling.’