Joey Tilson, a mechanical engineering master student at John Hopkins University talks about a new revolutionary prosthetic foot he and his partners developed that can help women walk and be able to wear their favorite shoes again.
Interview conducted by Ivanhoe Broadcast News in November 2016.
Can you tell me what was the goal of your team in designing this particular prosthetic?
Joey: Our goal was just to improve the quality of life in women veterans and to make a prosthetic that they could wear with a shoe that used to once make them feel beautiful and that they can’t wear anymore.
You guys had a goal in mind when you started to design this, can you tell me what it was?
Joey: Our goal was just to improve the quality of life for women veterans. Wearing heels can mean a lot to a woman and whenever that’s taken away from them it isn’t good. We recognized the problem and decided to try and make something to help that.
You said there is nothing like this that will allow them to wear those kinds of heels. It sounds like such a simple thing.
Joey: Right, so prosthetic companies have to cater to a specific function in their prosthetics and currently no company decided to tackle the high heel conditions because it’s not as big of a problem, I guess. I don’t know. But the highest prosthetics go currently zero to two inches so we wanted to make one that could handle zero to four.
Why zero to four?
Joey: The highest heels that we measured were stilettos and it was like four point three inches or something; most typical shoes only go to like two. The vast majority of high heels are in between that two to four range. We just chose four as our high end as very, very tall heels.
What was the challenge in doing that, taking a prosthetic that would go zero to four? Can you talk to me a little bit about the thing you had to do?
Joey: One of the biggest challenges we faced was having to mimic the ball of the foot. Standing in a high heel condition it’s a lot different than being on a flat foot condition because a lot of your weight is shifted to the front of your foot and your big toe is actually what keeps you from falling forward. In these prosthetics there is actually no toe, it’s just a piece of rubber, so we needed to try to make something that would just help that toe.
The biggest challenge then again was the ball of the foot where all the weight bearing is?
Joey: Right, exactly, and then also the range of motion of the foot. The human foot has been around for millions of years, it’s had time to evolve, and we have one year to make it.
Tell me what you guys had to do, walk me through some of the processes that you had to go through to physically make the foot.
Joey: We spent a few months just reading on what prosthetic industries use and what they need to make a certain prosthetic correctly. Some of the stuff that we actually did to make this is laying up carbon fiber to make this carbon fiber foot in the bottom. It gives a good amount of springiness so that it’s not like walking on a wooden foot. They actually have some kind of like flex in their step, in the return. We had to figure out a way to keep the ankle from moving whenever we had the high heel place. Since there’s a lot of weight put on it we ended up experimenting with different things and found that a bike square actually works perfectly for the application. It has a weird circular shape that whenever you close it, it puts a lot of pressure on the two discs without having to put a lot of pressure in to it.
Ultimately what did you guys come up with? You gave it a name?
Joey: Yeah, we call it the prominence.
Why that?
Joey: I couldn’t tell you.
How did you guys know that you finally had come up with something that you think would be acceptable?
Joey: It was just that time of the year honestly. But if I had to give you a better answer I would say that it’s because it just gave us the range of motion that we needed and it was stable enough in the conditions that we tested for it to actually work for these women’s needs.
Tell me a little bit about you were actually in the shop, how did you form everything, did you go to a prosthetic company to get the foot mold that here?
Joey: Yes, we bought a bunch of prosthetics off of e-bay, commercial prosthetics that people just didn’t want anymore. We kind of took them apart and looked at what they had and the vast majority of them actually did have carbon fiber in the feet. We did some research in to that and found out that carbon fiber is very strong and lightweight. Lightweight is something that’s really important when it comes to prosthetic because if it’s heavy, it just throws your whole body around. Imagine putting ankle weights on your feet and trying to walk around, it’s kind of weird. So you need to make it as light as possible. That’s where the carbon fiber came in. Then we had to use light metals; we needed something strong that could take the strength of someone walking all day on it and constantly loading and unloading. Most people would think steel because steel is a really strong metal but it’s incredibly heavy so we couldn’t use that. We had to explore titanium and different kinds of aluminum and stuff like that.
What did you finally come up with in terms of the metal?
Joey: Aluminum, we ended up making this thick aluminum plate here. Other models we had, had titanium but they just didn’t perform as well as this one in the test that we did.
How heavy is this foot?
Joey: If I had to guess one point four pounds.
END OF INTERVIEW
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