7/10/2012 By Meredith Staub
Written by By Meredith Staub
Illini Prosthetic Technologies (IPT), a nonprofit organization founded by engineering students at Illinois, was recently featured on the Big Ten Network on their series “Impact the World”.
“Impact the World” is a new original series on BTN, hosted by Dennis Haysbert. It focuses on the efforts of students and professors at Big Ten schools who are making a humanitarian impact beyond their campus. IPT was featured in a “Medical Research” episode for their efforts in making affordable upper-arm prosthetics in developing countries.
“We were excited when they got in touch with us to do that,” said the vice-president of IPT, Adam Booher (B.S. Engineering Mechanics ’11). “It was really kind of a neat chance to reach out to a larger audience, and maybe people who hadn’t heard about what we were doing before.”
IPT began as an idea in the summer of 2008, when Jonathan Naber (B.S. Materials Science and Engineering ’11) decided he wanted to use his technical skills to make a difference in the world. He had worked with people with disabilities before, so he decided to combine those two passions.
After doing preliminary research, he was inspired by the Jaipur Foot, a prosthetic foot and leg that was being made and sold for very low costs in India. While prosthetic feet and legs normally cost thousands in American dollars, the Jaipur Foot could be manufactured for less than $50, and was often provided to patients below the poverty line for no charge by the Jaipur Foot Team.
Naber realized that there was nothing similar for upper-extremity prosthetics. In fact, there appeared to be a technology gap between lower- and upper-extremity prosthetics worldwide; it was here that he found his cause.
Naber originally approached MechSE professor Michael Philpott with his idea, asking for advice on how to begin and how one would manufacture an affordable, yet durable, prosthetic.
“My main area of interest and my research is in design for economic manufacture,” explained Philpott. “So I basically provided some bouncing off of ideas, ways they could bring the price down: how they could make it, how they could make the shape and form economically. They were playing with things like soda cans and coke bottles and two-liter bottles for what you put over the stump of your arm, as opposed to buying something ready-made. So their first prototypes were all coupled together out of everyday products, not because that’s all they had, but because that’s what they were thinking they would actually make them out of! It was very creative.”
Naber recruited several of his peers to help him in his endeavor and, he said, “The magic just went on from there.”
IPT has come a long way since then. They have expanded from two people discussing soda can prosthetics to a team of both student and alumni engineers from multiple departments, working on their first viable, marketable product. They have enlisted the help of faculty, such as Philpott and MechSE professor Liz Hsaio-Wecksler, and met with the original inspiration of the project, the Jaipur Foot Team, to ask for their input and start forming a partnership. They have recently received an NCIIA grant that will allow them to return to India with their latest product.
The IPT team was also recently awarded another grant: a public engagement grant through the MechSE department to run field and validation tests in Guatemala for 18 months. Their current advanced prototype has been tested and verified, both in the lab and in Guatemala, and they have used the feedback they gathered to make changes and improvements on the original design. The grant allows them to return to Guatemala, where they will try to integrate IPT into the international developing community there, as well as set up the long-term validation testing of the latest prototype, which they hope is ready to take to market.
“What this grant is going to help us to do is to go from what we’re calling an advanced prototype to what will really be the first product that we can put in the field,” Booher said. “It’s this final stage, this final push. Our goal is to get the product out to people who can test it for us, and people who can really start using it. And by doing that, we want to get a lot of feedback and really just continue to make our device better and better.
“Our goal, down the road, is to be able to have this technology and then distribute it to aid organizations all over the world,” Booher said. “The big thing right now is that with current prosthetic arms, you have to custom-fabricate them, you have to use special tools, you have use special processes. It takes time, it takes training, and it takes special equipment. And with our device, you can do the same type of fitting without a lot of that special equipment. We can use a pair of pliers, a pair of wire cutters, just some simple tools, and we want to make it so that you can walk into someone’s home with one of our products in your backpack and actually fit it to them right then and there. That’s the real promise that we see, that’s the mission, and this grant is really going to help us to do that.”
Along with the grant, and their support from MechSE faculty, IPT has also sponsored a project group in ME 470, the department’s senior design class. The group is currently designing a system that can test the arm for fatigue, so that data can be gathered both from field tests and environmental tests in the lab.
“It’s going to be really valuable information for us,” Booher said. “My background is MechSE, I’m an Engineering Mechanics graduate, so this is my department, really. It was a good opportunity to really engage this department as well and work with the resources that are here, the individuals, the experts, the students. We’ve always had really strong support from this department, and we really want to continue to work with this group because it’s a great university department to be partnered with.”
Their work has been highly praised and supported by the scientific community. In 2010, Jonathan Naber was the fourth annual winner of the annual Lemelson-MIT Illinois Student Prize for his innovation and leadership in IPT. Only four students nationwide won the award and its monetary prize of $30,000. In August 2011, IPT was named “Autodesk Inventor of the Month” by Autodesk, Inc. in their Manufacturing Community online publication. Their product design was a finalist for the James Dyson Award in 2011, the only finalist from the United States. Naber was also awarded the William E. Simon Fellowship for Noble Purpose upon his graduation in 2011, which came with a $10,000 grant to support his work.
Professor Philpott wasn’t surprised that they had come this far, although he admits they have progressed and grown faster than he would have believed.
The team still has a way to go. The long-term validation of the prototype in Guatemala will take until the end of next year, and the feedback they receive from these tests will need to be used to improve the product before they start trying to integrate their organization into the aid community.
Booher is extremely hopeful about the product’s outlook.
“When I look at what we have, and look at the excitement in professionals who have tested it, excitement that I’ve seen with the amputees that have used it, it’s really promising to me that it’s going to work well,” Booher said. “And I think it’s exciting to go from the point where you have ideas about how it could work, but the amount of things you need to do to make it work is seemingly infinite, you can’t see the light at the end, to where we are now. We have a finite list of things we need to do to get it ready to go out in the field; that to me is really exciting, because having that list means that we’re really close. It means that these are things we can do, and I know with the training and background that we have, and the support and resources that we have access to, we can really make those changes. I think we all really believe that it’s going to get out there, it’s going to work, and people are going to be able to use it. And that’s really exciting.”
The team encourages anyone interested in its project to visit its website, www.supportipt.org, to keep updated on its progress.
Photo Credits: Illini Prosthetic Technologies