Development of biomechanical analysis techniques for fatigue of transtibial prosthetic socket and pylon interactions

摘要

The lack of formal, engineering based information is prevalent in the prosthetic industry. Currently, very few prosthetic manufacturing companies can definitively tell their patients how long their products will last. Because of this lack of information, many amputee patients will experience failure of their transtibial prosthetic device during daily activities. One such failure occurs from the fatigue of everyday use. Fatigue failures originate from the repeated application of certain loading conditions. These repeated loads usually occur for millions of cycles before a transtibial prosthetic catastrophically fails. The purpose of this study is to develop a testing procedure and apparatus that can more definitively predict the failure of a transtibial prosthetic.