When it comes to high-tech bionic legs for amputees, all the cool stuff is titanium, carbon fiber or other, more exotic materials. With carbon fiber “blades” all the rage, it’s easy to forget that simpler technologies still work, and could be made to work even better with the addition of some inexpensive electronics. The Economical Bionic Leg project is the result of that idea.
Project creators [PremJ20] and [G.Vignesh] aren’t kidding about bringing the cost of these bionic legs down. The target goal is $60 per, with stainless steel and silicon rubber as a cheaper alternative to carbon fiber — the rubber would be molded to fit the amputated region. The heart of the project is a Particle Photon development board, with a flex sensor and accelerometer monitoring the prosthesis and supplying data to the cloud. It’s essentially a basic prosthetic leg with a monitoring system built in. Placing a sensor cuff on the regular leg, the artificial limb’s flexibility can be fine-tuned to match the two.
Will this inexpensive bionic leg ever compete in the Olympics, like [Oscar Pistorious] run in the 2012 London event? Probably not — the tech that goes into artificial limbs has the same amount of material science going into it as F1 racing and turbojet design. Still, this is a very cheap way to bring tech into something that desperately needs to be cheaper, and it’s a great Hackaday Prize entry, to boot.
I’d cut off my own leg before I had to use a cloud enabled prosthetic… oh wait.
Wood is a surprisingly useful material.
Arrrrr, that it be.
i wonder way all idiots out there want to make cloud-dependent all projects they are developing.
this is a typical project that MUST work in stand alone mode.
no matter if they are doing banana cutter, shoes, chairs or prostatic leg: the mantra of new generation is: “it must be cloud-dependent”
fu*k off, you as*ole!
I would hope the cloud thing is only for development data… if it needs to download run/walk/hop profiles from the cloud in realtime in order to work, then we should go cloud enable everything in the developers house and sit outside with a bunch of tesla coils.
I hereby would like to applaud [PremJ20] and [G.Vignesh] for beeing standup people, i love these sort of projects that are about helping your fellow man(/woman) and these things should be applauded. (Especially when taking into account shitty HaD members like ‘Aleks Clark’ in the next article about helping people)
I hope that you guys succeed and i see these legs ‘in the wild’ in a year or so, keep up the great work!
I don’t think they are doing anything new, besides adding “CLOUD” nad “IOT” to prosthetic legs
not ‘nad’ it’s ‘and’
Hackaday ,please add edit function…
Spelling nazi: silicone rubber, not silicon