Prosthetics

Campana creates innovative prosthetics for pets without limbs, and even for wild animals.

Although most of the clients are dogs with knee problems, orthotics and prosthetics have been fashioned for a wide range of other animals, including horses, goats, cows, turtles and birds.

When Cameroonian golf champion Issa Nlareb Amang lost his legs and most of his fingers to meningitis in 2018, many thought his life in the sport was over. But, thanks to donors, he was able to get prosthetics that allowed him to return to the game and become the only disabled professional golfer in West Africa.

An ocularist is a person who makes ocular prosthetics.

An oculist doesn't make ocular prosthetics; that's an ocularist.

Presently, prosthetics rely on relatively heavy hydraulic, electric or pneumatic actuators to flex artificial fingers, but scientists at Germany's Saarland University are experimenting with much lighter fibers made of a nickel-titanium alloy that change shape when connected to a source of electricity.

One of the challenges to designing prosthetics, or exoskeletons for the disabled, is that everyone is different. Technology designed to help a person walk or get around doesn't work very well when it is built to be one-size-fits-all. But scientists at Carnegie Mellon University have figured out a quick, easy way to make each prosthetic different.