Conventional walking prostheses are currently still expensive, hardly recyclable and very costly to manufacture. This makes them less accessible to people in crisis areas or countries with a less developed healthcare system, despite prostheses being able to grant people a path back to mobility and independence.
The founders of steptics, Marc-Antonio Padilla, Daniel Kun and Benjamin Els have made it their mission to change that. They have been working on an automated process for manufacturing prostheses since 2020, when they also won the Strascheg Award.
"We want to provide more people worldwide with sustainable, high-performance as well as cost-effective walking prostheses [...]. The process we have developed allows us to adjust individual parameters such as amputation height or a person's body weight automatically via a computer,"
explains Marc-Antonio Padilla. Instead of the previously very manual and energy-intensive manufacturing process of prostheses being made of barely recyclable fiber composites, Padilla states that the steptics team has also already been able to successfully produce prototypes with significant cost and energy savings.
Further, he said:
"With the DBU funding, we want to expand our vision in the future and for the first time provide access to maximum and sustainable mobility for people with amputations worldwide."
They also plan to use the DBU grant to manufacture the in walking prostheses from bio-based materials such as natural fibers. This should make the prosthetic components easier to recycle after use and, according to the startup, save half the manufacturing costs and 90 percent of climate-damaging greenhouse gases compared to traditional manufacturing. It's a sustainable and efficient solution that should give more people access to prosthetics in the future, while protecting the climate and the environment.
We wish the steptics team continued success in their mission to make walking prostheses accessible to all!
Additional information about the grant is available on the DBU website.