Development of a Passive Ankle Foot Prosthesis with Manually Adjustable Ankle Stiffness

Abstract

Major advancements have been made in the field of prosthetics, but devices remain largely out of reach for the amputee population domiciled in the developing nations, which makes up 80% of the entire amputee population of the world. The amputees are left to contend with low function prosthetics that do not mimic the behavior of the natural lost limb, with the long-term use of such devices leading to physical injury to the user. This work was aimed at developing a low-cost ankle-foot prosthesis that affords the user the opportunity to manually alter the stiffness of the ankle, as well storing energy in a forefoot section to aid push-off in late stance. In this paper, the design and results of structural analysis performed on critical parts of the prosthesis are presented, as well as the future direction of the work.