Prosthetics

NOW — August 19, 2018

Anonymous — Sat, 01 Dec 2018 18:40:00 +0000

NOW — August 19, 2018 Anonymous (not verified) Sat, 12/01/2018 - 11:40

Eight-time Paralympic medalist Blake Leeper aims to compete in the 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo. The double-amputee traveled to ��񱦵� for evaluation by CU scientist Alena Grabowski (Kines’98; PhD’07). She has helped some of the world’s most famous amputee-athletes establish eligibility for contests against athletes with natural legs. Amputees often must prove their prosthetics give no advantage.

Here Leeper is pictured at Balch Fieldhouse on campus.

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Blade Runners

Anonymous — Fri, 01 Jun 2018 15:00:00 +0000

Blade Runners Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 06/01/2018 - 09:00

Lisa Marshall

CU’s Alena Grabowski is helping a new generation of amputee athletes reimagine what’s possible.

Hours before student alarm clocks go off, Alena Grabowski (Kines’98; PhD’07) slips on a head lamp and trail shoes and heads for the hills.

When she’s in motion, the 60-mile-a-week trail runner doesn’t think much about how her foot hits the ground with each step, how she slightly adjusts her balance as she rounds each switchback or how her stride might be different if her calves were made of carbon fiber instead of flesh and bone.

But when she gets to work at ��񱦵�, that’s all she thinks about.

One of a half-dozen researchers on the planet who specializes in studying lower-limb prostheses for runners, Grabowski, director of CU’s Applied Biomechanics Laboratory, has dedicated her career to helping elite amputee athletes like former South African sprinter Oscar Pistorius, aka the “Blade Runner,” and German long-jumper Marcus Rehm, aka the “Blade Jumper,” address a controversial question that could make or break athletic dreams: Should runners with prosthetic legs be able to compete alongside non-amputees?

Meanwhile, Grabowski is also developing a new generation of prostheses — blades — that could enable everyday athletes to do things that are difficult, if not impossible, to do today. Among them: Trail running.

“I never take for granted the fact that I can get up in the morning and go for a run without even thinking about it,” said Grabowski, 45, who has run 50-mile events in Colorado’s San Juan mountains and multi-day races through the Italian Dolomites. “I just want everyone to be able to move like I can.”

Unfair Advantage?

Grabowski won’t forget the moment in August 2012 when Pistorius burst out of the blocks in London Stadium, becoming the first runner without biological legs to compete in the Olympics. As she watched on TV, the humble scientist couldn’t help but feel pride knowing she helped get him there.

I just want everyone to be able to move like I can.”

“It was a huge deal for the Paralympic community,” she said. “And for me, career wise, it was a turning point.”

The daughter of a track coach in Minnesota, Grabowski started running not long after she could walk. When she arrived at ��񱦵� as a student in the mid-1990s, she began translating that passion into a unique career. She earned a bachelor’s degree and a doctorate in CU’s integrative physiology department, studying under sports biomechanics researcher Rodger Kram. During post-graduate work at MIT, she worked with Hugh Herr, a famed mountaineer who lost both his legs after a climbing accident and now develops bionic prosthetics.

All along, she kept hearing about Pistorius, who was making headlines for his impressive times in the 400-meter, and for rumors that his J-Shaped Össur Cheetah blades gave him an unfair advantage.

In 2008, just as Grabowski was wrapping up her post-doctoral work, the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) banned Pistorius from competing against able-bodied runners, citing a German study that concluded his blades allowed him to expend 25 percent less energy.

When his lawyers scoured the globe for a scientific team that could provide a second opinion, they found Herr, Kram and their junior colleague — Grabowski.

“It was exciting just to be a part of it,” she said.

The team gathered at Rice University in Texas, then among the only labs with a treadmill fast enough to measure Pistorius at full throttle. Over three whirlwind days, they and four researchers from other universities assessed his biomechanics, energy expenditure and endurance at a lightning 24 mph pace.

In the end, the researchers struggled to agree how to interpret the data they’d collected. But five of seven — including Herr, Kram and Grabowski — concluded that Pistorius’s blades put him at a disadvantage because they pushed off with less force than a biological limb would.

They also concluded the methods the German researchers used to measure aerobic energy expenditure were flawed.

Bottom line: There was “insufficient evidence” he had a competitive edge, Herr, Kram and Grabowski concluded.

How can you really determine conclusively whether someone has an advantage or disadvantage?”

They made their case before the Court of Arbitration for Sport — and won. Pistorius (who in 2015 would be convicted of murdering his girlfriend and ultimately sentenced to more than a decade in prison) was eligible for Olympic competition.

At the 2012 summer Olympic games, he made history, running the 400-meter event in 45.44 seconds, the first double-amputee ever to participate.

“For kids who had an amputation and for adults who had some sort of physical disability — to see this guy push the boundaries like that, it opened a door,” Grabowski said.

She’s worked hard to keep it open.

Burden of Proof

Today, six years after Pistorius’ Olympic debut, the IAAF maintains a 2007 rule prohibiting mechanical aids, unless an athlete can prove they don’t provide a competitive advantage.

Essentially, Grabowski said, amputee athletes are guilty until proven innocent by science.

That stance, and similar polices by high school and college governing bodies, puts her rare expertise in high demand.

In 2016, she provided scientific evidence to the NCAA that paved the way for below-the-knee amputee Nicky Maxwell to run track at Harvard.

To catch blades that fly loose: A net behind the treadmill.

In 2017, she persuaded the NCAA that — as with Pistorius — there was no scientific evidence suggesting high school sprinter Hunter Woodhall, whose legs were amputated below the knee in infancy, is advantaged by his prostheses.

“I am running in college in large part due to Alena and her work,” Woodhall, 19, said from his dorm room at the University of Arkansas. He is the first double-amputee ever to earn a Division 1 track and field scholarship.

Meanwhile, German long-jumper Rehm is waiting for science to answer key questions about his blade.

His hopes of competing in the 2016 Rio Olympics were dashed after the IAAF determined he’d failed to prove he had no advantage. Grabowski, who has studied Rehm extensively, determined his prosthesis decreases his run-up speed but provides a more efficient take-off for the long-jump. She’ll study amputee long-jumpers further.

“It’s an important question, but also an elusive question,” she said. “How can you really determine conclusively whether someone has an advantage or disadvantage?”

Building a Better Blade

At CU, Grabowski has her own state-of-the art treadmill, a shiny $100,000 machine that can clock runners at up to 30 mph and measure their force in 3D. Sometimes she places a net at the back in case their blades come loose.

One morning this spring, 35-year-old trail runner and marathoner Steve Hinson, who lost a leg in a lawnmower accident at age 9, hopped on the treadmill with dozens of sensors affixed to his body.

As he ran at various speeds and inclines, fresh data accumulating, Grabowski looked on, contemplating ways to help him and runners like him.

Contrary to common belief, prosthetic blades haven’t advanced much in the past decade, she said. For sprinters, they feel awkward and cumbersome in the starting blocks, and they perform poorly in curves. For trail runners, the inert limbs can be uncomfortable over long distances, and they lack the sensory feedback mechanisms that aid smooth movement up and down hills.

“I think we can do a lot better,” Grabowski said.

She envisions a day when impaired athletes can choose among various blades — models sanctioned by sound science for use in strictly governed competitions, and models for anything-goes fun-runs, which might, indeed, help them push beyond the limits of the human body.

Ultimately, blade runners say, athletic success at the highest level requires more than technology.

“The reality is, no one can just put on a pair of blades and be instantly fast,” said Woodhall, the Arkansas runner. “You still have to train and lift and take care of yourself and put in the work. No one wants to have all that work discredited by people saying the only reason you can do what you do is because of your blades. That’s why the work she is doing is so important.”

Photos by Glenn Asakawa

CU’s Alena Grabowski is helping a new generation of amputee athletes reimagine what’s possible.

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ReForm's Madalyn Kern

Anonymous — Fri, 01 Sep 2017 17:49:36 +0000

ReForm's Madalyn Kern Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 09/01/2017 - 11:49

Madalyn Kern (MechEngr'12; PhD'16) at the Catalyze CU Demo Day in July. Her company, ReForm, is developing a low-cost, adjustable prosthetic socket for amputees.

Photo by Logan Guerry

Madalyn Kern's company, ReForm, is developing a low-cost, adjustable prosthetic socket for amputees.

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Start-up Fever

Anonymous — Fri, 01 Sep 2017 10:15:01 +0000

Start-up Fever Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 09/01/2017 - 04:15

Eric Gershon

Entrepreneurs are coming out of the woodwork at ��񱦵�. It's no accident.

Kimberly Drennan had two goals in late summer 2014, and neither involved starting a business.

The CU instructor, an architect, was honing an idea for an upcoming sophomore design studio and aiming to aid America’s long-suffering honeybees.

Yet three years later she’s CEO of HiveTech Solutions, LLC, a Boulder-based start-up firm developing technology and data services for commercial beekeepers to monitor hive health remotely, enabling timely, efficient interventions.

“All of this was new to me,” Drennan said of start-up life.

At root, HiveTech is the product of an idea, an attitude and an increasingly robust ��񱦵� entrepreneurial ecosystem that encourages students, faculty and staff to see themselves as enterprise builders — and helps bring enterprises to life.

CU hasn’t always been an easy place for would-be entrepreneurs. That began to change after local investors and business leaders convened with CU professors and executives in 2007 to tackle two big questions: What is an entrepreneurial university, and how could ��񱦵� become one?

Kimberly Drennan, CU instructor

Among the first initiatives to emerge from the 35-member group’s discussion was the New Venture Challenge (NVC), a nine-month, incubator-like program culminating in a spring championship with real money at stake.

In 2016 HiveTech won NVC’s grand prize, walking away with nearly $25,000 in all. The most recent top five finishers netted almost $100,000 in prizes and private investment. Greater sums will be on the line in 2017-18, NVC’s 10th anniversary.

Since NVC’s founding, ��񱦵� has vastly expanded support for entrepreneurs across campus. There’s broader access to relevant academic courses, new co-working and maker spaces, a selective business accelerator program, intensifying interaction with Boulder’s start-up community — and a growing appreciation that entrepreneurship isn’t just for MBAs and software developers.

“Now it’s really the opposite of 10 years ago,” said the law school’s Brad Bernthal, who oversaw NVC until this year and teaches a popular venture capital course. “It’s a different university.”

NVC now falls under the purview of CU’s Research & Innovation Office, home of a burgeoning cross-campus innovation and entrepreneurship initiative.

Ideas to Action

Amid all this, in 2014, Kim Drennan was exploring projects for her environmental design students.

Scouting a potential site on CU’s East Campus one summer day, she spied a cluster of beehives along Boulder Creek. Aware of the dramatic decline of the honeybee population in recent decades, she wondered if there might be a way to help them through architectural design. Maybe her class could dream up better hives.

Drennan tracked down the hives’ owner, a doctoral student named Chelsea Cook (PhD’16), who was studying how bees regulate hive temperature. They then met with Drennan’s faculty colleague Justin Bellucci (EnvDes’08; MCivEngr’12), an expert in sensors. “We sat down over martinis and just started talking,” Drennan said.

The idea began to evolve beyond the project her students would ultimately take on. Maybe Drennan, Cook and Bellucci could develop a sensor technology system that would generate data for commercial beekeepers — data about hive temperature and humidity, perhaps, or weight and acoustics. This would add a more scientific dimension to beekeeping, minimize reliance on time-consuming visual inspections and benefit both bees and hive operators’ bottom line.

When Drennan filed an invention disclosure with CU’s tech transfer office, she learned about the NVC and dove in headfirst.

“We wanted to test if our idea could be a business,” she said. “We really didn’t know.”

NVC has deliberately minimal entry requirements. Teams need one person with a valid CU ID — faculty, student or staff — an idea they can articulate and the chutzpah to present it to a live audience in 60 seconds at an annual fall “quick pitch night.” Last year 30 teams showed up, including NVC 9 overall winner Give & Go, which has developed an automated film-editing process for sports teams.

Give & Go ultimately walked away with $64,000 in seed money. Second place finisher ReForm, which is working on self-adjusting prosthetic limb sockets, netted $21,500.

A year earlier, Cook (now a postdoc at Arizona State University) had made HiveTech’s opening pitch, taking home the award for best idea, the first in a series of successes.

“It was a real shot of energy,” Drennan said — and yet not HiveTech’s biggest score that October night.

Sue Heilbronner, CEO of MergeLane, a firm that cultivates and invests in women-led start-ups, was among the judges. Peggy Tautz (MBA’17), then a CU MBA student with an engineering background, was in the audience.

“Sue actually grabbed Peggy’s hand, grabbed me and said ‘Y’all need to talk,’” Drennan said.

Heilbronner went on to mentor HiveTech. Tautz helped the team explain the technical aspects of their evolving project in terms businesspeople could appreciate.

��񱦵�'s start-up infrastructure is paying off.

At a later mentor-matching event, the HiveTech founders met other local businesspeople who would help them test their ideas, asking tough questions and unearthing “all the pieces we didn’t have in place,” Drennan said.

“Every time we went to one of those events, some other little golden nugget showed up,” she said.

The HiveTech trio found a name, won midway NVC contests and gradually came to see the firm as both a technology and data services provider. The founders also polished a five-minute pitch for NVC’s championship round.

In the spring, Drennan, Cook and Bellucci delivered it jointly before a standing-room-only campus crowd.

Before the night was out, NVC 8’s four-judge panel declared HiveTech the year’s overall winner.

As a CU doctoral student, bee expert Chelsea Cook and two CU instructors co-founded a Boulder firm that aims to help large-scale commercial beehive operators maximize hive health and business efficency.

Acceleration

Fresh off the NVC victory, HiveTech won a spot in another campus program for entrepreneurs, Catalyze CU. Where NVC is a highly-inclusive shaper and filter of ideas, Catalyze CU is a selective business accelerator that hastens the formation of actual companies.

Founded in 2014 by the College of Engineering, Catalyze CU offers entrepreneurs of all backgrounds an intensive eight-week summer boot camp: Weekly lectures on business fundamentals plus opportunities to rub elbows with other start-up teams while refining their ideas with mentors and beginning to build businesses. Each team gets a $4,000 stipend.

Drennan learned about raising capital, business plans, budgeting and types of corporate structures. She and her co-founders labored over their technology, began talking with potential customers and expanded their idea of what the company could be. Was it just a hardware maker, or a data services and analytics firm, too?

By the end, the HiveTech team better understood their aims and potential and were convinced that an architect, a civil engineer and a biologist could also be entrepreneurs.

That’s the mentality CU wants to foster, said Sarabeth Berk, assistant director of the innovation and entrepreneurship initiative — one that “pushes people beyond what they thought was possible for themselves.”

HiveTech is still in its early stages. The firm is perfecting its technology and fine-tuning its focus to address the needs of large-scale growing operations in particular. But there’s momentum. The company has grown to six people with diverse expertise. It’s testing its latest prototype on dozens of hives while courting customers and investors. And it’s winning notice outside Boulder: The U.S. Dept. of Agriculture recently awarded HiveTech $100,000 to forge ahead.

“The training wheels are off,” said Drennan. “We are in full-scale execution mode.”

Without NVC and Catalyze CU, HiveTech might be a good idea, she said — but not a business. “It wouldn’t be anywhere but back in the classroom,” she said.

Entrepreneurs are coming out of the woodwork at ��񱦵�. It's no accident.

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