Design News magazine is featuring an article on the development of advanced limb replacements and other motorized medical systems that are currently in advanced stages of development at US universities and national labs.
A veteran of the Iraq war yearns to perform normal activities after losing a hand to a roadside bomb. A stroke victim wants to regain use of a partially paralyzed limb. A surgeon searches for a safe method to operate on a beating heart.
Design engineers, working with medical professionals, are devising solutions to all these challenges, in large part by implementing cutting-edge motion systems. Engineers at Johns Hopkins University, for example, are leading a global effort to design the most sophisticated bionic arm ever.
In Massachusetts, two young MIT engineering grads have devised a motorized brace to re-educate muscles in stroke victims. And at Carnegie Mellon’s Robotics Institute in Pittsburgh, an engineering professor has developed a micro-robot that can literally crawl across a heart to perform medical procedures.
All these systems, as the following case histories show, pioneer advanced motion control, actuation and sensing technologies that promise to help patients, as well as spawn new ideas for engineers in other applications.
Read the entire article describing the various research projects at Design News…