College Park Industry’s iPecs, a wireless prosthetic gait lab, was named the winner of the electronics category in NASA’s 2011 Create the Future Design Contest. This annual contest, first launched in 2002 by the publishers of NASA Tech Brief magazine, aims to stimulate and reward engineering innovation.
The iPecs (Intelligent Prosthetic Endo-skeletal Component System) is a wireless research tool that studies human locomotion and gait parameters in lower limb prosthesis users, according to a company press release. The wireless capabilities allow researchers to measure the forces and movements that a prosthesis user experiences in normal daily activities.
Data recorded by the iPecs sensor can be wirelessly transmitted in real time to a PC interface. This technology allows researchers to study forces and torsion-moments in prosthesis users without the confines of a laboratory, providing a method to objectively measure the full range of real-world kinematic data in a prosthesis user.
The iPecs is currently available to gait lab researchers, but a clinical version for use in prosthetic offices will be available in early 2012.
