A team of students at MIT, including an Indian, has come up with an improved and better fitting design for the Jaipur Foot, an artificial leg for amputees.
NEW DELHI: A team of students at MIT, including an Indian, has come up with an improved and better fitting design for the Jaipur Foot, an artificial leg for amputees.
The new method uses a hand-powered system to build the prosthetic that is expected to last longer than the ones currently being built and sold in the country by the Rajasthan-based charity, Jaipur Foot Organisation, according to news from MIT.
The modified design that eschews dependence on electricity is also expected to bring down the cost of the artificial limbs and benefit more patients in rural areas. The present electrically powered fitting system often requires bringing along a bulky generator.
The JFO, also known as the Bhagwan Mahavir Viklang Sahyata Samiti, claimed to be the world's largest provider of prosthetics, currently manufactures artificial legs using electric power to create the mould with Plaster of Paris.
The new design of the custom-built limbs is the result of a year-long project by the Mechanical Engineering wing of the MIT, the four participants of which spent two weeks in Jaipur in January this year and conducted one test run of a fitting.
"The personnel at the JFO were really pleased with the results," says engineering student Maria Luckyanova, who was in the country for testing the device.
"They liked the fact that the new system produced less waste, required no electricity and seemed to produce a better fit that might lead to a longer-lasting prosthetic. That's because the plaster of paris in the traditional method shrinks slightly as it hardens, making the fit less exact," says Luckyanova.
The first step in fitting a leg is to make the mould of the person's stump by placing it in a container filed with tiny glass beads and covered with silicon rubber and then creating a vacuum so that the beads seal tightly around the limb.
This "negative" mould is then filled with more glass beads to form a positive mould- an exact replica of the stump- and the socket of the prosthetic leg is made to fit that replica, explains the MIT researchers.
In the new fitting system devised by the team,a hand-crank creates vacuum that is used to produce both the initial negative mould and then the positive mould that replicates the shape of the stump.
The students, Philip Garcia, Maria Luckyanova, Tess Veuthey, Jessica Schirmer along with Indian-born instructor Goutam Reddy are now in the process of streamlining and refining the design according to suggestions from the JFO personel.
"We will be back this summer to do some field testing," says Luckyanova. Typically in countries like the US a prosthetics specialist who fits artificial legs for amputees might handle 15 to 20 patients , a year, fitting them with custom-built legs that costs approximately $ 6,000 apiece and upwards. This is accompanied by a series of follow-up visits to make sure threat the new limb was properly fitted.
The artificial legs provided by JFO on the other hand costs about Rs 1,600 and the company which has worked with about a million patients since it was founded in 1975, usually does not have the time or funding to develop newer methods or follow up consultations.
The MIT project was made possible due to a grant by the Cambride-based University's Public Service Centre and a $ 7,500 award that the team won in a competition last year.
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