Training and Fitting Amputees during Situations of Daily Living – APSIC

The project concerns motor disability. In particular, it deals with amputee people locomotion. It is commonly known that lower limb amputation results in lifelong disability. In their everyday life, level walking is just one of the situations people with amputation have to cope with, while stair and slope ascent and descent, for instance, are much more difficult tasks. Indeed, joint functionalities necessary for level walking are different from those needed in these other situations. Lower limb prosthesis are the only way to restore joint functions in people with amputation. After amputation, most of the patients come back home. To guarantee a correct social reintegration, patients have to reach a sufficient level of autonomy. However, the current prosthetic components are optimized specifically for level walking and, often, they are not adapted to walking in other conditions, offering a limited level of autonomy to people with amputation.
The project aims at proposing innovative prosthetic devices in order to increase the ability of people to realize current tasks during their everyday life. To complete the range of functionalities offered by the already available products, the prosthesis developed during the project will be both totally new designed and conceived from innovating prosthetic apparatus using existing prosthetic components.
Besides, optimal use of prosthesis cannot be reached without specific rehabilitation orientated toward targeted situations. To develop such a rehabilitation program, taking advantage of the whole environment of the patient, is a therapeutic innovation that would help clinicians to better restore gait functions. Nowadays, very few patients benefit from a prosthesis specific rehabilitation and very few researches took both aspects of the prosthetic management into account at the same time, even if they are obviously connected. The project will take advantage of non invasive gait analysis systems to develop rehabilitation processes useful during clinic routine.
From a scientific point of view, the project will allow to gain knowledge about gait mechanisms in the considered conditions. Moreover, the information associated with the modeling work will lead the partners to better understand the influence of geometrical and mechanical characteristics of the prosthesis on the patient’s gait.