Computerized prosthetic leg offers new hope for amputees

01:00 AM EDT on Thursday, June 14, 2007

By Paul Davis

Journal Staff Writer



Kathleen Church, of Pawtucket, has an adjustment made to a new prosthetic leg she is trying out at Nunnery Orthotic & Prosthetic Technologies.

The Providence Journal / Bill Murphy Bill Murphy
NORTH KINGSTOWN — Marjorie Pike-Braiser broke her arms and lost a leg when a drunken driver slammed into her minivan in Florida.

The crash instantly killed her husband of 35 years.

At a nearby trauma center, doctors operated on her right leg 10 times before they removed it.

Seven years later, Pike-Braiser can play shuffleboard, walk on an artificial leg and get around in a wheelchair. But she no longer hikes in the White Mountains, rides a bike or swims in the ocean. She plays the piano, but not the organ — she can’t feel the pedals with an artificial foot.

Despite the limitations, yesterday Pike-Braiser could not stop smiling.

The 69-year-old Warwick woman spent the morning walking on a shiny new robotic leg controlled by a computer.

She and three other Rhode Islanders tried out the leg during a product “road show” sponsored by Otto Bock, a German maker of advanced prosthetics and one of a handful of companies worldwide that make artificial limbs that employ microprocessors. They strapped on the legs in the offices of Nunnery Orthotic & Prosthetic Technologies, a designer and maker of artificial limbs and braces. The Post Road company is certified to fit the Otto Bock limb to local patients.

The high-tech prosthetic, which can cost around $50,000, was first introduced in the United States in 1999 and is used by some 16,000 amputees worldwide, said Otto Bock spokesman Jeremy Hines. Insurance companies and Medicare sometimes pay for the limbs, with qualifications.

The C-Leg — named after the computer language used to program it — features a microprocessor that “takes a reading 50 times a second,” Hines said.

That signal controls the knee’s hydraulic system and “gives a patient the ability to descend ramps and steps” and take on hills and slopes, he said. Using a laptop computer and a wireless signal, users can program the leg for a brisk walk, a game of golf, a run or a bicycle ride. A wireless remote allows them to switch modes. The leg, he said, “always knows where it is in space.”

Patients can also pivot and turn corners, and don’t fall or stumble the way they do on older-model legs, Hines said.

Pike-Braiser tried out the high-tech leg on a sidewalk while another amputee, Scott Moltzan, held her hand.

“Ride the knee,” said Moltzan, a C-Leg demonstrator who lost a leg in a snowmobile accident 10 years ago.

NORTH KINGSTOWN resident Chris Turillo tried the leg in the uneven grass next to the parking lot. The robot leg bent and straightened as he walked.

Turillo, 54, lost his right leg when a driver struck his motorcycle 17 years ago.

“I woke up three days later. They didn’t think I’d make it.”

Turillo, a former kickboxer and runner, took it hard. “One day I was running triathlons and then — boom — my life changed in 90 seconds.”

Turillo got a prosthetic limb that resembled “a steel tube with a knuckle joint.” He fell down a lot, suffered from phantom limb pains and gulped Vicodin. His girlfriend left him.

He tried working at several jobs, but suffered from back problems. More recently, he worked at a welding shop, but his boss worried that he would fall and the company would be liable, he said. “Now I’m back on disability.”

INSIDE, TWO OTHER amputees walked up and down three stairs inside the office.

Fran Reissen, 48, of Cranston, lost a leg to cancer in 1998. “One day I was a nurse and the next day an MRI showed this big ugly tumor.”

Kathleen Church, 51, of Pawtucket, was born without a femur, the thigh bone, in her right leg. The doctors tried and failed to stretch her leg with pins and traction. In 1969, they gave Church two choices: she could lose a leg or wear a brace forever. Church chose amputation.

“You have better mobility,” even with an artificial leg, she said.

During breaks in the demonstration, the four amputees talked about their early struggles with older-model artificial limbs.

Her first encounter with a prosthetist was not good, Church said. “He said, ‘Here’s your leg, good luck.’ ”

The mother of two struggled to find a good fit. At one point she wore a belt with rivets to hold her artificial leg in place. The rivets came undone while she held her six-month-old son, who “flew out of my arms.”

Other patients stumbled and fell. One called her early leg “a straight pole.”

“You never forget you’re missing a leg,” said Pike-Braiser, who said her phantom pains are like “a vise clamping your toe.”

Outside, Turillo stood on the robot leg, remembering his athletic past. A few feet away stood the Otto Bock “road show” van, covered with life-size photos of an amputee astride a bike and a woman in black dress dancing on a shiny metal leg.

Said Turillo, “I’d like to run again.”