Focus: Above The Knee Amputees / Microprocessor Knee Prosthetics | Period: Bachelor’s Thesis Semester 2017 | Mentor: Leonie SlatteryUntethered is a Prosthetic Attachment that recharges electronic prosthetics by converting the user's movement into electrical energy.
This mind map highlights the major areas the project would address over the thesis period. It also served as the blueprint for the written thesis.
To validate the notion of harvesting energy from biomechanical energy, a piezoelectric footpad was developed for testing. However, the energy produced was so minuscule that another method had to be developed.
As it wasn't possible to directly modify one of the interviewee's prosthetic knee, a prototype knee attachment that can recharge phones by harvesting the wearer's biomechanical energy was designed and developed.
The attachment had a prominent shaft that drove a gear train that exponentially amplifies the RPMs going into a brushless motor generator.
The final design was meant to be open source by publicly providing the design files to people to retrofit the system to work with their prostheses. However, that proved to be too challenging for the average person. In the future, I want to develop a script that automates the process based on given user dimensions.
