Virtual prototyping and physical experimentation of lower limb prosthesis

Among rising technology in medical field, methods and solutions of reverse engineering have a high impact as a new possibility for improving the traditional processes to design prosthesis and orthoses. Furthermore, reverse engineering solutions allows managing a big amount of patient's data, which can be also exploited for making the medical assessment during rehabilitation activities more objective and measurable. In particular, innovative technologies permit to manage big amount of data coming from several IT devices in order to better understand the correlation between technical aspects and human factors. These IT devices can be exploited through customized software applications, which are able to combine many data types (e.g. 3D scanners, motion capture systems and pressure sensors). In this research work, the attention is focused on the design of lower limb prosthesis around the digital human model of the patient. We present a virtual platform composed by an ad-hoc developed application for customizing the prosthesis according to patients' life style and medical knowledge as well as for visualizing pressure on patient's limb while evaluating his/her gait in a unique virtual knowledge-guided environment. Such applications are conceived to be usable by non IT experts, and all information are directly visualized on the digital human model of the amputee. The first part of the paper introduces the whole platform to design lower limb prosthesis using low-cost technologies. Then, the virtual gait analysis tool is described. Finally, tests and conclusion are discussed.