Artificial limbs in the high tech age

Your legs may not seem all that smart, but they're pretty good at letting you walk without having to think about what you're doing.

That hasn't been the case with artificial limbs, which have long required wearers to put a lot of thought and effort into a simple stride. Now, though, a newer generation of prosthetic devices is making use of chip technology to make walking a more natural act for amputees.

One such device is the C-Leg, from Otto Bock HealthCare, a German company that got its start working with war victims in the first years after World War I. The C-Leg is a decidedly 21st-century device, with a microprocessor in the knee that reads data 50 times a second — from real-time sensor data — to help the wearer negotiate changing terrain. The company also provides upper-body devices such as a new "dynamic arm" that for the first time has power-assist technology in elbow.

Bert Harman, president and chief executive of Otto Bock's Americas region, recently spoke with ZDNet UK sister site CNET News.com about R&D challenges, getting nerves to talk to prosthetics and the current state of bionics.

Q: How big a business is high-tech prosthetics, and what is Otto Bock's part of that business?
Well, if you start as high-tech prosthetics, it's relatively small. In fact the whole prosthetics industry is a small industry. In United States alone, there are about 1.2 million people that are amputees.

It's a small industry and because of that there is very little fundamental research, so we are generally late to adopt things. Electronics and composite materials and all the things that make up high tech today have been around for a long time, but it's only been in the last five to 10 years it was applied into this portion of the business.

What is the state of the collaboration between the medical and scientific community?
There is a fair amount of collaboration in centres [such as] the Mayo Clinic, the Cleveland Clinic, Johns Hopkins, Stanford... There are a number of people who are interested, and have established gait labs as an example, to study the gait and how prosthetics impact that. That's adequate. I think what we're missing is the ability to develop good clinical claims... because again there aren't that many people. In a traditional drug study, a drug company might study 5,000 patients or more, and if we do a C-Leg study, we're lucky to get 20 patients.