Design and Testing of a Bionic Dancing Prosthesis

Traditionally, prosthetic leg research has focused on improving mobility for activities of daily living. Artistic expression such as dance, however, is not a common research topic and consequently prosthetic technology for dance has been severely limited for the disabled. This work focuses on investigating the ankle joint kinetics and kinematics during a Latin-American dance to provide unique motor options for disabled individuals beyond those of daily living. The objective of this study was to develop a control system for a bionic ankle prosthesis that outperforms conventional prostheses when dancing the rumba. The biomechanics of the ankle joint of a non-amputee, professional dancer were acquired for the development of the bionic control system. Subsequently, a professional dancer who received a traumatic transtibial amputation in April 2013 tested the bionic dance prosthesis and a conventional, passive prosthesis for comparison. The ability to provide similar torque-angle behavior of the biological ankle was assessed to quantify the biological realism of the prostheses. The bionic dancing prosthesis overlapped with 37 ± 6% of the non-amputee ankle torque and ankle angle data, compared to 26 ± 2% for the conventional, passive prosthesis, a statistically greater overlap (p = 0.01). This study lays the foundation for quantifying unique, expressive activity modes currently unavailable to individuals with disabilities. Future work will focus on an expansion of the methods and types of dance investigated in this work.Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Media Laborator

Development of a bionic dancing prosthesis

Thesis: M. Eng., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2014.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (pages 37-38).Research on lower extremity prostheses has primarily focused on activities of daily living, such as walking and running, but has largely overlooked less common activities. As a result, traditional prosthetic devices are designed for a walking/running gait, and are difficult to use for other activities. This study aims to take the first steps to determine if a bionic prosthesis can enable alternate activity modes, not driven by traditional activities of daily living. Specifically, we aim to modify the BiOM, a commercial robotic ankle prosthesis, to allow a professional dancer and below-knee amputee to dance the Rumba. The movements of an able-bodied professional dancer were quantified and analyzed in order to develop a novel dance control system for the BiOM. With minimal hardware modifications, a powered prosthetic device was developed that enables the subject to dance more proficiently than with a traditional prosthesis.by Nathan Villagaray-Carski.M. Eng

Torque vs. ankle angle data.

<p>Non-amputee ankle torque plotted against ankle angle for the under arm dance step. The color of the region indicates the percentage of the dance step data within the region; the darkest red regions had the highest concentration of data. The line of best fit is shown, which was used as the basis for the biologically inspired control system.</p

Regression results from non-amputee data.

<p>Regression results from non-amputee data.</p

Schematic of bionic dancing prosthesis.

<p>Bionic ankle prosthesis shown (left) with major components highlighted (right). Note the location of the battery in the distal prosthetic socket.</p