The Lemelson-MIT Program named 14 winners of the 2018 Lemelson-MIT Student Prize on April 10.
Tyler Clites, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) graduate student, won $15,000 for a new approach he developed for people with amputations called the Agonist-antagonist Myoneural Interface (AMI). AMI is comprised of a novel surgical technique for limb amputation and a complementary prosthetic control system. It provides patients with proprioception, or the sense of the relative positioning of their prosthetic body parts in space. AMI was designed to enable people with
amputations to receive feedback of joint position, speed, and torque from their brain-controlled prosthetic limb, improving their ability to perform everyday tasks and enabling them to feel as though their prosthesis is a part of their body.
A total of $80,000 in prizes was awarded to 14 undergraduate and graduate student inventors, selected from a large and competitive pool of applicants nationwide. Students were selected based on factors including the overall inventiveness of their work, the invention’s potential for commercialization or adoption, and youth mentorship experience.