A team of 10 students from the Anderson High Robotics team is working on creating a new knee brace, along with two biomedical engineering students from the University Of Texas (UT) and Dr. Larry Kravitz.
Kravitz is a family medicine doctor at a Regional Clinic in Austin who has come with the idea of a knee brace that he hopes would help patients suffering from osteoarthritis in postponing surgery for a few years. The funds for the project were provided by a donation from the Austin Regional Clinic. The team has created a working model of the brace, which provide relief from some stress that the knee joint is subjected to on a daily basis, thereby, reducing the pain and postponing the need for surgery.
Kravitz has been working on creating a brace that transfers the body’s weight away from the joint for three years now. He is joined by Chet Murthy and Michael Hemati, bioengineering students from UT. They started working on the prototype in 2010 and have taken help from the Anderson robotics team. Kravitz explained that at present, the braces shift the body weight to the stronger parts of the knee; ultimately, they aim to transfer the weight from the joint to some other part of the body. The brace is designed in the form of a neoprene sleeve that can be worn like pants, with two rods on both sides of the knee that flex like a bow. While flexing, these rods push down the calf and thighs so that the body’s weight is carried by the rods and not by the knee joint. The prototype is expected to be ready by the end of the year. One of the teachers at Anderson says that by involving themselves in this project work the students are exposed to real-life applications of the concepts that they learn in school. At school, these students have worked on computer aided designs that simulate a knee joint.
Source: http://www.bme.utexas.edu