The problem
Prosthetics and exoskeletons tend to move like machines because they are designed like machines. A human knee is not a hinge — it has stiffness and damping characteristics that vary through the gait cycle, and a wearable robot that ignores them produces motion the wearer’s body has to fight rather than cooperate with.
Before you can recreate those properties, somebody has to measure them.
What we built
Research identifying the properties of the human knee so that those properties could be recreated in wearable robots such as prosthetics and exoskeletons, giving them more human-like behavior. This is upstream work: it produces the parameters that a device designer needs before the first bracket gets drawn.
Why it matters here
This is the part of a hardware program that founders most often skip and most often regret. Related work continues at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, studying biomechanical outcomes for soldiers who have experienced extremity trauma.
We are also invested in how this knowledge travels: Yves is a policy fellow at the Open Source Hardware Association, where he develops strategies for standardizing the process of creating open source medical devices.