Lim: A Prosthetic That Radically Improves Lives

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The design of prosthetics offers a great

parable for innovation today.

Consider, for all the invention that's

surrounded the knee itself,

creating new ways of mimicking the way a human knee moves,

there's been relatively little attention

paid to the socket .

Which is the molded cup that meets the residual limb.

Even the best molded cup isn't comfortable to wear

for anything longer than a few hours.

One company that we found taking a really bold look

at the problem was Limb.

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While in many cases designers try to put themselves

in the place of the user.

Let's say you were designing something

for somebody that was blind.

You might be able to close your eyes

and imagine what it might be like to be blind.

But you can't take your leg off.

So we built this rig.

It's called the empathy rig.

What it does is it gives designers,

who are not amputees insight around

what it's like to carry your weight of your body

up under your tail bone.

We've created a rig where we can

interchange the seat parts very quickly.

And understand what feels more comfortable,

what's giving support, what's giving control.

The thigh is ment to transfer weight

down to the foot.

But upon losing a limb at the thigh level

you now have a distal stump

that is not accustomed to bearing weight.

What we're capable of doing

is a almost bicycle seat type of concept.

Or a ischial seat we call it.

In the traditional socket this purpose

is integrated into an entire frame.

With the Limb Infinite Socket,

we essentially isolated that functional purpose

into one aspect of our socket,

and tried to optimize it.

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The main frame is based on a thermoplastic carbon fiber.

Which is selected for the performance

that those materials bring.

The carbon fiber struts come as enlarged sheets.

And we water cut them to specific sizes.

And, from a digital file of a residual limb

we capture certain portions of that surface

and create a digital representation

and mold the carbon fiber to that representation.

The limb is dynamic.

Different portions of the limb

also change on a day to day basis.

Residual limbs fluctuate about 10 percent

in volume over an extended period of time.

With The Infinite Socket we've built in

adjustability to essentially become a dynamic device.

We took a lot of inspiration from the athletic industry.

Specifically snow board boots,

in terms of how they conformed around the limb.

Especially the ratcheting buckle system.

There's a brim at the top,

which serves as a soft tissue interface.

And that has an adjustability to it.

These are parts of the brim and internal parts.

The ischial seat mechanism slides into

this portion of the brim.

One of the engineering feats was to

we needed tension here and at the top.

Figured out a little triangulation

so this outside brim gets these macro adjustment buckles

which allows us to tension in the entire thing

with one single ratchet.

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Well the first time I put it on,

it felt like a shoe.

Or a baseball glove,

or something that you would want to put on every day.

And I walked all over San Francisco.

Companies like Limb offer good proof

of the maxim that design isn't just about

creating some fancy new object.

Rather it's about finding the right problem to solve.

And in this case,

solving that problem immediately improves a life.