URI project brings joy to amputees in Colombia
COLOMBIA - The boy looked at his new arm and grinned. How does that big thing work? What’s with the wires? Circuit boards?
Corvah Akoiwala leaned across the table and pressed a button. The fingers balled into a fist, then burst open. The boy’s eyes lit up. Akoiwala asked the boy to try the arm on, and he did. He crushed a plastic cup. “He just started smiling,” says Akoiwala. “That was it. He had no words.” The team clapped Akoiwala, the University of Rhode Island biomedical engineering student who made the prosthetic arm, and other URI engineering students, all key players in a college project to help four Colombians who had lost limbs. “The work was hard, but seeing how happy he was made everything worth it,” says Akoiwala, who delivered the new arm to the boy, Joysi, in August. “I was able to change someone’s life for the better, and that was incredibly rewarding, maybe the most rewarding thing ever.” Spearheaded by URI’s Spanish International Engineering Program, “Sustainable Prostheses: An All-Inclusive Approach to Designing in the Americas” was a collaboration with SENA Centro Nacional Colombo Alemán in Barranquilla and made possible by a $25,000 grant from the “100,000 Strong in the Americas” program, a federal initiative to inspire Americans to study in Latin America. The URI students started working on the artificial arms and hands as far back as March, collaborating with their colleagues in Colombia through emails, Skype and conference calls. “We really got to know them that way,” says Akoiwala, of Providence. “Talking, not just about engineering, was really important. It helped us work better as a team.” The Colombian students identified four patients, ages 7 to 60, who had lost limbs, most in tragic accidents. (Fourteen-year-old Joysi’s arm was sliced off just below his elbow when he fell off his roof at the age of 7.) They took measurements of the patients and forwarded those details to URI. In Kingston, the students made the arms and, in some cases, hands with a 3-D printer. They learned how to connect the prosthetics to an Arduino circuit board, and they took a design class to learn how to make an arm, or hand, that is functional and attractive. In June, the Colombians visited URI for three weeks to work on the prosthetics and bond with their American colleagues. They ate together, traveled to local beaches, and even took a trip to New York City.
(phys.org/news)