Prior to losing an arm and a foot when he fell underneath a train in 2012, James Young went on a run pretty much every day after work. After his initial recovery period was over, and he was fitted with prosthetic limbs, Young tried running again. “It wasn’t worth the pain,” he declares. The agony felt by Young didn’t come from the injury or from the prosthetic limb itself. Rather, the socket — the cup that fits over the stump doctors created at the injury site — caused the distress. (The problem is common among many amputees.) “Sockets are, in my opinion, kind of a nightmare,” Young says. They’re “just pain, pain, pain, essentially.”
Cambridge Bio-Augmentation Systems (CBAS), located in Cambridge, England, aims to solve the socket problem for good with digital technology. Its solution: an innovation called the Prosthetic Interface Device (PID), which founders Oliver Armitage and Emil Hewage describe as a kind of USB port for the body. Creating a standardized connection between an artificial limb and the body, the PID is surgically implanted at the injury site and a prosthetic limb with a matching connector is plugged directly into it. This revolutionary device is what results when entrepreneurs, surgeons, clinicians and patients collaborate using applied materials, machine learning and neuroscience. Currently in pre-clinical trials, the PID has a projected market release in 2018.
“Today, technology and data intelligence are allowing people to change the way we address and ultimately solve our most pressing social and environmental challenges,” says Tae Yoo, senior vice president of corporate affairs at Cisco. “Digitization is leading to a greater understanding of the connection and interdependency between people, process, data and things. As a company, Cisco strives to inspire, connect and invest in opportunities that accelerate global problem solving; CBAS has an innovative way of tackling this challenge.”
Current sockets pose a number of problems. The fit must be so precise that it continually has to be adjusted, and if a patient gains or loses weight, the socket will need to be refitted or replaced. Even changes in temperature can be enough to noticeably change a socket’s fit. Most patients need a new one every year or two, and because it presses against the skin, a socket can easily cause inflammation, infection and other problems.
CBAS’s device eliminates these problems, drastically improving a patient’s quality of life. Instead of hugging the exterior of the body, the PID connects directly to the skeletal system. This means that the skeleton (not soft tissue, which can easily be damaged or injured) bears the weight of the artificial limb. Connecting to bone also changes the way that the body relates to a replacement limb: “You can have this direct connection to the mechanical, solid parts of the limb, which allows for some proprioception,” or awareness of where the limb is in space, Young explains.
There’s a financial benefit as well. The existing socket-based system for attaching prosthetic limbs to the body is hugely expensive. Every single socket must be custom made and adjusted repeatedly until the fit is perfect. “It’s like someone’s trying to hand-make you some shoes, but they’re always painful, and you’re going to have to keep redoing the process,” explains Hewage.
In contrast, the PID is extremely cost-effective and low-maintenance. Ernst & Young crunched the numbers and found that Cambridge Bio-Augmentation’s PID system could lower the cost of artificial limbs by 60 percent, reducing the need for constant follow-up visits to prosthetic clinics. Any prosthetic limb can be designed to attach to the PID, and a patient can live with the same one for decades. “As an engineer, you constantly benefit from standardization,” says Armitage. “I can buy a bolt from this shop and a nut from this shop and put them together. The prosthetics industry doesn’t have that right now. Making a standardized connector, you enable the rest of the engineers to work with that and move forward and make better devices.”
The advantages of a standardized connection between the body and an artificial limb go far beyond convenience and cost savings. Thanks to some amazing advancements in robotics technology over the past few years, new high-tech bionic limbs can be controlled by patients’ minds (just like a natural limb). The PID can connect with these robotic arms or legs, creating a simple electric connection between the body’s nervous system and the artificial limb.
“It’s not just a standard mechanical connection, it’s a standard electrical connection,” says Armitage. “In order for the mass population of amputees to be able to have access to neutrally-controlled devices, you need a standardized way of communicating with that prostheses. With a PID, the interface between the biology and the engineering has already been done by our product.”
Eventually, the PID could be used to allow other types of devices beyond even the most advanced prosthetic limbs to connect to the body. “I can’t see any way that the USB connector for the body wouldn’t revolutionize the human condition,” Young says, drawing on his first-hand experience with the PID. It’s precisely that kind of blue-sky thinking that drives Hewage and Armitage to continue to innovate, pushing the potential of the PID even further.
To address today’s social and environmental challenges, collaboration and investment in innovative early-stage tech solutions is a must. Digital transformation is well underway in many industries thanks to organizations like Cambridge Bio-Augmentation Systems. Entrepreneurs who see challenges as opportunities waiting to be solved are already at work — creating, inspiring and helping people thrive.
This article was produced in partnership with Cisco, which believes everyone has the potential to become a global problem solver – to innovate as a technologist, think as an entrepreneur and act as a social change agent.
Tag: prosthetic limbs
Kate’s Hand: Using a 3-D Printer to Build a Toddler’s New Hand
In Huntsville, Ala., there is a sticker-obsessed little girl named Kate Berkholtz, age 2. She is pint-sized inspiration for all wannabe go-getters — a strong-willed toddler who “doesn’t take crap from anybody,” according to her mother, Jessica Berkholtz.
Kate always knows what she wants to do, and she almost always manages to do it. Right now her favorite pastimes include romping around on jungle gyms and skidding down slides headfirst. But as she gets older, some seemingly basic kid activities — like swinging from monkey bars or riding a bicycle — may not come so easily. This is because Kate was born with a congenital abnormality that left only a thumb on her left hand; four fingers are missing.
Prosthetic limbs are an option for children as young as Kate, but they run anywhere from about $10,000 to $50,000, and insurance companies typically don’t cover the cost because young patients will outgrow the devices so quickly. Kate’s family’s insurance would have paid the bulk of the fee, her mother says, leaving the family to come up with the remainder — $3,000 to $5,000 — but the “expense was still a little ridiculous,” Berkholtz says.
MORE: These College Students Couldn’t Afford a 3D Printer. So They Built One.
Enter Zero Point Frontiers, a space engineering company in Huntsville that heard about baby Kate’s predicament and volunteered to help. Jason Hundley, the company’s president and CEO, was introduced to Kate’s family through his wife, who runs a local children’s gym that the family attends. Serendipitously, Zero Point Frontiers had recently acquired a 3-D printer, which the company’s engineers quickly set about using to devise and build a low-cost, kid-size prosthetic hand. The engineers uploaded the hand design into the printer via a memory card, which the jet printer then used as a blueprint to guide its spray, back and forth, layer by layer, depositing tiny particles of plastic gradually to produce the 3-D object.
Made out of a biodegradable polymer, the hard contraption fits onto Kate’s forearm with Velcro straps and is powered by her wrist movements. When Kate bends her wrist, the wires that act as tendons tighten, curling the little plastic fingers and allowing her to grip and pick things up.
It’s no small triumph, though the toddler is perhaps more interested in the fact that the prototype she’s testing comes in ocean blue, with neon green digits. Kate initially said she wanted a pink Dora the Explorer hand, says Hundley, but the 3-D printer has only 12 colors, and pink is not one of them. It doesn’t matter — Kate likes anything bright.
Hundley plans to make a variety of attachments for Kate’s hand — a separate one for bike riding, for swimming, for holding the bow of a violin. While adult prosthetics are designed to accomplish a broad range of functions and to last for many years (and to be flesh-toned, of course), Hundley says that the low cost of producing each of the 3-D-printed devices — about $5 for the hand, mostly to cover the cost of the straps and wires, and $1 for each attachment — means that you can make as many as you want and keep swapping them out as the child grows. “This technology brings something that was the price of a car down to the price of a latte,” Hundley recently told the magazine Orthopedic Design & Technology.
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The technology has actually been around for decades. Charles Hull, an engineer, invented 3-D printing in 1984 as a way for companies to model prototypes before firing up their factories and producing a design en masse. But in the last 10 years or so, as prices for the technology have come down, it’s been adapted for other uses, especially in the biomedical field. At Wake Forest School of Medicine in Winston-Salem, N.C., for example, researchers led by Dr. Anthony Atala are using 3-D printers to shape human tissue cells into replacement organs. Atala wowed the world in 2011 when during a TED talk in California he unveiled the world’s first printed kidney. The organs aren’t quite ready for use in patients yet, but ultimately, the goal is to produce organs, valves and other patient-specific tissues for people in need of transplants.
“This is only the beginning,” says Hundley. “For the first time, they’ve created printers that are less than $5,000. … In the coming years, you’re going to see much, much more of these types of applications.”
Going forward, Hundley hopes to make Kate’s printed hand modular, scalable and open source. That way, anyone can modify it to fit their particular needs, print the hand’s plastic structure and assemble it from anywhere in the world.
For now, he’s made a remarkable difference in the life of one towheaded toddler. Kate is “wanting to do things that her big brother is doing, like ride a bike or ride a trike, hold onto monkey bars, that kind of thing,” says her mom. “And this technology is going to let us do that like any other kid, for, like, five or ten bucks.”
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