muscles and duplicate whatever the healthy limb can do. i never thought it would be possible for me to juck up stairs. once we started it, it s remarkable how easy it is for me. we re working on a robotic leg for the above-the-leg amput amputees. we ve got the fully powered knee and ankle. it can move by itself but is not connected to the user in any kind of explosiicit way. it has sensors on it and it understands how the user s interacting with it. the leg has two fully powered joints. it has a motor at the knee joint and a motor at the ankle joint and the motors are the equivalent of the muscles and the sensors are the same as the sensors in a healthy limb. if you look at conventional prosthet prosthetics, you have to sling them around to move them around and this is a leg with the equivalent of muscles what we found is people use less energy when they walk with it and people generally walk faster and they can do things like go up
years ago at m.i.t. i had written a grant i submitted to the veterans administration, the veterans affairs, and that grant was funded, and we used those monies at m.i.t. to develop really science of how the human ankle behaves and mapping that to how you build a synthetic device that emulate that is functionality. my name is ed lesowski. in 1967 i joined the army, and i was medically retired in 1984 after having a motorcycle accident on the 7th of august, 1981, where i took off most of my thigh, broke my femur, severed the artery in my right arm. i wanted to focus my walk on the ankle joint initially. when a person walks by far they re getting the most power