Garth Stewart lost his left leg below the knee two years ago in an explosion in Iraq, where he was stationed in the Army. Now, he jokes that he's fulfilled a childhood dream by becoming part-robot, with a new form of motorized prosthetic limb developed by researchers at Brown and elsewhere.
"C'mon, everyone wanted to be a cyborg," said Stewart, now a sophomore at Columbia University.
He's the second person to use the PowerFoot One, which was unveiled July 23 by the Center for Restorative and Regenerative Medicine, a partnership of Brown, the Providence Veterans Affairs Medical Center and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The project was funded by a $7.2 million grant in 2004 from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and the Pentagon.
The center is directed by Professor of Orthopaedics Roy Aaron, who also helped develop the limb. The center will soon move into a new, $6.9 million building at the Providence VA hospital, according to a Department of Veterans Affairs press release.
The researchers are seeking to develop advanced replacement limbs and conduct research in the field of "bio-hybrid" prosthetics at a time when many soldiers like Stewart are returning from overseas with amputated limbs.
Hugh Herr, one of the PowerFoot's inventors and an associate professor of media arts and sciences at MIT, was the first person to test the device - he is a double-amputee. The PowerFoot has a mix of sensors and specialized control algorithms that ensure the user stays balanced while walking, he said.
Herr and Stewart demonstrated walking with the artificial foot at the device's public unveiling in July.
Stewart said the most noticeable difference in the prosthetic, which responds to pressures from the remaining section of the leg, versus other, less advanced models was that the PowerFoot allowed the person wearing it to stand straight while walking and that it did not put so much pressure on the hip.
"It's kind of like having your leg back," Stewart said of the project's eventual goal: Linking the motorized prosthetic limbs directly to the brain using the BrainGate technology developed by Professor of Neuroscience John Donoghue PhD'79 P'09.
After the public unveiling of the foot, iWalk - a company co-founded by Herr and a self-described "leader in wearable devices for human augmentation," according to its Web site - decided to mass-produce the device, starting next summer.
