PrintWe’re at the Wearable Technologies (WT) Conference this week in San Francisco and caught up with featured speaker, Stanford Professor Steve Collins, to get his thoughts on the blurring lines between wearables and prosthetics.
In our ongoing “hot tech” series we amplify those actively shaping the future of technology. Collins fits the bill. He is Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering and, by courtesy, the Bioengineering Director at the Stanford Biomechatronics Laboratory.
Q: OEMs want everything smaller and lighter. What areas of prosthetics are bulk and size is a major challenge?
Professor Collins: Prosthesis users also want devices that are small and lightweight, primarily to avoid discomfort from the device repeatedly, partially sliding off the residual limb and then being pushed back into place. For simple, unpowered devices, we are near the limit on making lightweight devices; well-designed carbon fiber and fiberglass prostheses typically weigh much less than the biological features they replace. For powered, robotic devices, however, there is much room for improvement.
Q: Most think of prosthesis as a replacement for what was lost, but where are the lines blurring between prosthetics and wearables?
In the long run, we should expect prosthetic devices to augment human performance. However, we have basic scientific research to do before this is possible. The best prosthetic limbs still underperform biological devices, and substantially underperform what we think should be possible based on computer simulations. It is likely that there are important changes that accompany amputation, particularly in the nervous system, that we do not yet understand and therefore do not yet well address.
Q: Where are engineers at global leading OEMs failing to execute in areas academia has shined a spotlight?
Some exciting new techniques are emerging that have not yet been incorporated into commercial devices. Perhaps the most exciting is human-in-the-loop optimization, a technique for automatically customizing assistive device characteristics that has led to the best exoskeleton performance to date by a factor of two. This technique could be applied to any robotic device to enhance performance, and could lead to surprisingly good outcomes for patients.
Professor Steve Collins, Stanford
Professor Steve Collins leads the Stanford Biomechatronics Laboratory, where he researches how to design better prostheses and exoskeletons using human feedback and emulation. He also studies efficient autonomous devices, such as walking robots and unpowered exoskeletons. He has a background in mechanical engineering, biomechanics, and robotics from Cornell, Michigan, T. U. Delft, and Carnegie Mellon. He also teaches design and robotics courses.