Helping Amputees Walk Naturally

Watch this video to learn more about a new prosthesis — driven by the nervous system — which helps people with amputation walk naturally. The surgical amputation procedure, developed at MIT, reconnects muscles in the residual limb.

“This is the first prosthetic study in history that shows a leg prosthesis under full neural modulation, where a biomimetic gait emerges. No one has been able to show this level of brain control that produces a natural gait, where the human’s nervous system is controlling the movement, not a robotic control algorithm,” says Hugh Herr , a professor of media arts and sciences, co-director of the K. Lisa Yang Center for Bionics at MIT, an associate member of MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research, and the senior author of the new study.