Toward improving residual limb climate within prostheses for persons with lower limb loss: a technical note.

Background: Individuals with lower limb loss often wear a gel liner and enclosed socket for connecting to a terminal prosthetic device. Historically, a significant limitation to traditional liners and sockets is that they are thermal insulators, thereby trapping heat and moisture within, which can lead to numerous deleterious issues, including loss of suspension and residual limb skin problems, and, in turn, reductions in mobility, function, and overall quality of life. To mitigate these issues, new approaches are therefore needed to enhance the residual limb climate (e.

The influence of a hydraulic prosthetic ankle on residual limb loading during sloped walking.

In recent years, numerous prosthetic ankle-foot devices have been developed to address the demands of sloped walking for individuals with lower-limb amputation. The goal of this study was to compare the performance of a passive, hydraulic ankle-foot prosthesis to two related, non-hydraulic ankles based on their ability to minimize the socket reaction moments of individuals with transtibial amputation during a range of sloped walking tasks. After a two-week accommodation period, kinematic data were collected on seven subjects with a transtibial amputation walking on an instrumented treadmill set at various slopes.