About the Project
The Open Prosthetics Project is producing useful innovations in the field of prosthetics and freely sharing the designs. This project is an open source collaboration between users, designers and funders with the goal of making our creations available for anyone to use and build upon. Our hope is to use this and our complementary sites to create a core group of lead users and to speed up and amplify the impact of their innovations in the industry.
Our current list of active projects is available on the wiki. Please contribute or suggest your own. Join our social network to connect with users and other volunteers.
Below are some recent progress reports:
We're Looking for a Few Good Ideas · 10 January 08 by Jonathan Kuniholm
Lead users are consumers (individuals or companies) who spur innovation in an industry by contributing innovations often of a greater value and at a faster pace than the companies that produce the products they use. Their innovations are often freely shared and eventually incorporated into products. Far from being an idealist fantasy, lead user innovations can be incorporated into the R&D strategy of a nimble company, enabling quick identification and anticipation of consumer needs. What we’re trying to accomplish through the Open Prosthetics community is to facilitate this phenomenon, well-described in MIT Professor Eric Von Hippel’s book, “Democratizing Innovation” (downloadable free from his website or ours).
Innovations by amputee-users are very important in the history of prosthetics, notably by folks like D.W. Dorrance, designer of the early split hook, versions of which remain the most popular arm terminal device today; Bob Radocy, whose innovative grip and sports devices are sold at TRS ; and Dr. Hugh Herr, developing powered ankles in his lab at MIT. Perhaps less well-known but equally important are the prosthetists and technicians who have innovated for their patients over the years, contributing products and custom modifications for their patients, some of which have entered common use, and others which have not.
Join us at The Open Prosthetics Project, in assembling the core group of active innovators that the project needs to help us reach the next level in innovation. We have established a social net to allow direct connections, and a wiki including descriptions of active projects that can be freely edited. Contribute to an existing project, or start your own. Please download our flier, asking for help finding lead users, and post it where you see fit.
New Tools for Collaboration · 7 November 07 by Jonathan Kuniholm
After several months of hoping that we could figure out how to effectively manage the spammers on forums of the old Open Prosthetics site, we’ve given up, moved the forums to a new Google Group, and are trying to get up and rolling again. We’ve added a couple of free tools from other websites to help with collaboration.
Our new social net on Ning allows volunteers, users, and anyone who is interested to make direct connections and is, we hope, the magic bullet that will free everyone from being choked by our in box.
We’ve established a wiki, that you can participate in editing. Check out all of the new projects there, and consider discussing your ideas for new ones.
The Google Group duplicates some of the information available elsewhere, but also allows broadcast communication for those who like it.
Please let us know how things go, and we’re hoping these new tools and features get the Open Prosthetics community functioning in a way that we haven’t so far.