Tonya Stone
Mississippi State University, MS·Engineering
Walking with a prosthetic foot takes noticeably more effort than walking on an intact ankle. A healthy ankle stores energy as the body rolls over the foot and gives much of it back at push-off; today's prosthetic feet try to imitate this with springs, carbon fiber blades or simple beams, but these return less energy than ideal and their stiffness cannot be tuned to the terrain or walking speed.
- Fields
Engineering
Biomedical Engineering
- Topics
ankle foot prosthesis
lower limb amputation
prosthetics
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Dec 2026
What they work on
- Design an elastic spring for an ankle foot prosthesis using machine learning-based optimization to determine the curvatures and contours that maximize energy return during walking.
- Evaluate the spring design computationally with finite element analysis and confirm its mechanical behavior experimentally through bending tests.
- Build a lightweight, semi-active ankle foot prosthesis incorporating a high energy recycling mechanism that adjusts stiffness across different walking speeds.
- Test the completed prosthesis with participants who have lower limb amputation during walking trials, assessing its effect on gait and on musculotendon function.
More about the research
This collaborative project designs an ankle foot prosthesis built around a high energy return mechanism and then measures what it actually does for the people who walk on it.
Why it matters
About 2.1 million people in the United States live with lower limb amputation and rely on prosthetic feet to walk. A prosthesis that returns more energy and adapts its stiffness could reduce the extra effort these walkers expend, making daily walking less tiring and potentially improving quality of life, while the study's measurements would clarify how device stiffness affects muscle and tendon function during gait.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Zhaozheng Yin
Stony Brook University, NY·Computer Science
Develop motion capture from wearable inertial measurement unit (IMU) sensors alone to reconstruct and predict daily-life gait, using knowledge distillation from a multi-sensor teacher network to a simpler student network.
Aaron Young
Georgia Institute of Technology, GA·Biomedical Engineering·Early-career
Compare personalized hip versus ankle exoskeleton assistance for improving walking on both legs after stroke, testing the hypothesis that hip assistance yields larger walking-speed gains because stroke survivors compensate at the hip for ankle weakness.
Zhishan Guo
North Carolina State University, NC·Engineering
Develop a gait capture method using only wearable inertial motion unit (IMU) sensors, using knowledge distillation so a multi-sensor teacher network trains a simpler IMU-only student network to predict walking in daily life.
The school
Mississippi State University: 9 labs on PI Pages, $342M a year on research, 168 research doctorates a year.
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