DEKA (Dean Kamen) is a family friend. It’s amazing some of the things DEKA has developed... http://www.dekaresearch.com/coreTech.shtml
Lucky you. He must be fun to talk with.
I have a friend who is a below-knee amputee (one leg, auto accident). For the 16 years I have known him he has complained about his prostheses. A prosthesis would work tolerably well for a few months, then it stopped supporting him properly, or he got skin ulcerations, or the damn thing wouldn't stay in place. Always some new failure mode, soon followed by a change of devices, and after a few years by a change of prosthetists. It was extremely frustrating and depressing for him. From our conversations I decided that his prosthetists were more artists than scientists. I thought he needed a more scientific approach.
Last year he started going to a prosthetist who had trained and worked at Walter Reed, who knew cutting edge prosthetics technology and had lots of experience with amputee veterans. What a different experience! Finally my friend has a new type of prosthetic that really works, and a prosthetist who understands HOW it works.
I'm not a big fan of government health care, but federal funding of prosthetics research seems to me to be money well spent. The private sector will never get around to it. There are too few patients, so the return on investment just isn't there.