Double-Amputee MIT Professor Building the Most Advanced Prosthetic Foot

There’s no shortage of descriptions for Hugh Herr – athlete, MIT professor, inventor, extremist, daredevil, optimist, businessman and double-amputee.  At 17, frostbite claimed Herr’s legs about 6 inches below his knees after experiencing extreme weather during a climb on Mt. Washington in New Hampshire in 1982. 

Now Herr is busy developing the world’s most advanced prosthetics for his company iWalk, which will debut the PowerFoot One in 2010. 

According to iWalk, “The PowerFoot One is the world’s first actively powered prosthetic ankle and foot. Two powerful microprocessors and six environmental sensors evaluate and adjust ankle position, stiffness, damping and power thousands of times a second. Control algorithms generate human-like force while traversing level ground, slopes and stairs, providing active amputees with near-normal gait and lower energy expenditure compared to state-of-the-art passive prosthetics.”

“The fact that I’m missing lower limbs is an opportunity,” Herr told Forbes.com in A Step Beyond Human. “Between my residual limb and the ground, I can create anything I want. The only limits are physical laws and my imagination.”

To learn more about Hugh Herr and PowerFoot One, visit iWalk or read A Step Beyond Human on Forbes.com to check out pictures of Herr and his prosthetics.