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| Jerome Rifkin with the Tensegrity Foot prototype |
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) have awarded Tensegrity Prosthetics Inc., Louisville, Colorado a two-year, $750,000 grant to continue the iteration and prototyping of its Tensegrity flexible prosthetic foot, which is made of magnesium, aircraft aluminum, and steel-fiber rope.
Jerome Rifkin, Tensegrity founder, told The O&P EDGE he has received access to $415,000 of the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant for the first year's work. Along with engineer Jake Niece, Rifkin is refining the foot in preparation for further prototyping and human subject trials. When asked about the project's progress, he said, "It's such a complex system--interfacing with a complex world and a complex human body--that I just didn't know what the end result was going to be like with the first prototype. I'm very happy with how it works, but I had to spend months with an engineering contractor to find out exactly how forces were propagating through the device. Now that that's done, we've got the data we need to make the next one.... And I'd say that those next designs are about three quarters of the way done, which is done enough to show that there are maybe half a dozen questions that need to be answered as unit tests." He gave the example, "So, does this material butting up against that material generate too much friction to last for two million cycles?" and continued, "Those engineering qualification tests are what we're currently working on, and we should be done by the end of the quarter."
According to the Boulder County Business Report, Rifkin received a two-year, $200,000 SBIR research grant in 2005 and has raised another $150,000 in venture backing.
