New Heights in Prosthetics

About a week ago I read an article in Mechanical Engineering magazine that I found inspirational from several perspectives. Design-2-Part online magazine also covers the same story in this article.

C.J. Howard is a lifelong athlete who took up rock climbing in 2008 after an osteosarcoma forced him to have his lower left leg amputated. He initially tried climbing with his standard-issue artificial foot fitted to a climbing shoe, but the shape of the foot didn’t work well for climbing and it made the shoe wear out quickly. Howard consulted his climbing partner, Mandy Ott, who happened to be an environmental and aerospace engineer. Ott used an engineering CAD program to design an artificial foot that would be more effective for climbing. She decided an additive manufacturing process called metal laser sintering, which is often used for prototype fabrication, would be the best way to manufacture the new foot because it would be seamless. Metal laser sintering builds an object out of sintered metal powder layer-by-layer (each layer is about 20 µm thick) using a digital CAD model as a guide. Morris Technologies, an Ohio company specializing in this process, made the prosthesis out of titanium so that it would be strong and lightweight.

I’ll let you read the article for the rest of the story, but as you quickly discover, C.J. Howard gets around pretty well with his new climbing foot. Just one more example of how a little ingenuity and modern engineering technology combine to help people reach new heights – this time, literally!

-KB

Image Credit: Eric Lockheart on Flikr