In their quest to make prosthetic legs more stable and comfortable, engineers have tried every high-tech fix you can think of. From microchips to 3D printers, haptic systems, mind-machine interfaces and beyond, they’ve trotted out some ingenious solutions. But one promising new innovation is breathtakingly simple: turn the feet backwards.
The potential breakthrough came not from a biomechanical expert but from Ross Holland, a bilateral amputee since age three. He about-faced his feet a few years ago while struggling to negotiate an obstacle course at his local gym in southern Pennsylvania. The experiment bore immediate, dramatic results.
“It took a lot less energy to do basic things,” Holland, now 34, told a local TV station. “It made everything more comfortable.”
And it allowed Holland, a wheelchair user for most of his life, to switch to prosthetic legs for primary mobility. “I struggled for three decades to use my legs,” he says. “I needed the fit to be exactly right. I needed the padding to be right. Any disruption would make it difficult to stay in the legs.”
The 180-degree switcheroo completely reoriented Holland’s mobility habits. “I went from using my legs only in the evenings to wearing them all day. I no longer use the wheelchair at all.”
Holland has a history of thinking outside the box when it comes to mobility aids. As a college senior at Penn State, he set out to break the world record for the longest wheelchair wheelie. He set up in the student union food court, with a live-stream camera recording the action, and breezed past the existing mark (a mere 10 hours) with no problem. A day and a half later, Holland finally lowered the front wheels of his chair back to the ground after a 50-hour wheelie. That remains the world record (it’s duly listed at Guinness’s website).
When Holland described his backward-feet experiment to his prosthetic care team at Medical Center Orthotics and Prosthetics, they connected him with rehab specialist Scott Brown at the Anil Bhave Biomechanics & Engineering Labs in Baltimore. Their scientific gait analysis validated Holland’s subjective impressions: He walks much more proficiently with the feet facing backward.
“It enables him to have better posture and better placement for his center of gravity,” Brown told a Baltimore reporter. “It enables him to use his muscles more efficiently.”
While Holland lucked into a good outcome, he’s not encouraging others to follow in his backward-facing footsteps—not on their own, anyway. But Brown thinks this reverse-engineering idea is well worth testing on a broader scale. He and his lab are launching a broader study to see if the gait benefits Holland achieved can be replicated across a wide sample of users. If you’re interested in participating, log on at lifebridgehealth.org/research/abbel for more information.
