X3 lets Invictus archer aim higher
TORONTO — Steve Murgatroyd can walk up stairs normally, run in the rain and, soon, he’ll be able to ride his motorbike again with his prosthetic leg.
He has an Ottobock X3, an advanced microprocessor leg that uses high-tech sensors to mimic what his nerves and muscles used to do naturally, and it’s the leg he thinks will let him return to frontline service in the Canadian infantry.
For now, he’ll use it to compete in Toronto at the Invictus Games, an eight-day sporting competition for ill and injured armed forces members and veterans from 17 countries. With 550 athletes competing in 12 sports as diverse as running, swimming, powerlifting and wheelchair rugby, it’s an inspiring display of athleticism and the human drive to overcome adversity.
But, in reality, the hardest thing that Murgatroyd and many of the competitors will do this week is walk to their competition venues. Regular life, with all its variables — tripping over kids’ toys in the living room, walking on an uneven sidewalk or running to catch the bus — demands much more from a prosthetic leg than sprinting 100 metres down the track.
“It looks fine, minute to minute, but any distance of walking is extremely difficult,” says Murgatroyd, who competes in archery and the precision driving challenge.
It’s a similar story for the co-captain of Canada’s team, Maj. Simon Mailloux, who will swap out his X3 for a running blade when he competes on the track, or plays sitting volleyball without a prosthetic.
That just walking can be hard with a leg that costs $100,000 and looks strong enough to kick a car across the parking lot is not what many people expect to hear.
“Technology will come to a point, I truly believe in my lifetime, where we exceed our capacity, but we’re not there yet,” says Mailloux. “Now, my leg almost does what it used to.”
Prosthetics have come light years from the days of Terry Fox, who used an awkward skip-hop stride during his 1980 run across Canada because of the limitations of his prosthetic leg and old-style mechanical knee.
But the misconception that prosthetics are so advanced that they’re nearing the scenarios played out in Hollywood is something that Gary Sjonnesen deals with all the time. He’s the director of clinical services at the Canadian headquarters of Ottobock, the German-based company that manufactures the X3 and provides technical services at this week’s Invictus Games.
He shakes his head and goes on to explain that a sprinter’s natural foot and leg is far more efficient at storing and transferring energy than any mechanical spring currently in production.
“If we could develop a machine that could give back 250 per cent over what we put in, we’d be millionaires,” Sjonnesen says.
At Ottobock’s Burlington facility, with the cupboards and shelves full of titanium and carbon-fibre prosthetic devices that would look at home on the set of a Terminator movie and a lab designing silicone overlays that can match real skin right down to freckles and scars, it’s easy to see why people expect so much.
The X3, the original version of which was developed in collaboration with the U.S. military, is waterproof and comes with programmable modes for activities such as running, biking and golf.
But, overall, the biggest advance with microprocessor knees and the reason they were designed in the first place is that they reduce falls — the biggest problem for amputees.
In a 12-month period, about 4 per cent of able-bodied people will fall; it’s 66 per cent for amputees.
That’s a big deal because the vast majority of amputees bare little resemblance to the competitors at the Invictus Games or the even more elite athletes who compete in the Paralympics.
“They’re the ones that get the press and it’s good to expose people to it,” Sjonnesen says of the educational benefit of para sport.