Fused Filament Fabrication of Customized Continuous Fiber Physical Activity Enabling Prostheses for Children with Lower Extremity Amputation

About This Grant

Prosthetic limbs designed for physical activity, such as running blades, allow children to participate in sports and stay active. However, these specialized prostheses often are expensive and not always covered by insurance, making them difficult for many families to afford. Emerging technologies, such as 3D printing and cloud-based design tools, offer the potential to lower costs and to customize prostheses as children grow. Nevertheless, these innovations remain underused. This project will ascertain what children need from their prostheses by examining how their motivation to be active, body size, and movement type influence prosthetic performance. It will compare how advanced 3D-printed prostheses perform relative to traditional models under real-world conditions. Ultimately, this research will make high-performance prosthetic limbs more affordable, accessible, and tailored to the needs of active children. In addition, the project will create research and educational opportunities for students, introducing them to advanced manufacturing techniques, biomechanics, and patient-centered design, which will foster interest in STEM fields and help inspire future biomedical engineers. Recent advances in composite additive manufacturing and cloud computing have created new opportunities for the rapid, cost-effective production of complex, high-performance components. These technologies are well-suited to improve the design and fabrication of physical activity enabling prostheses (PAEPs) for children, offering scalable customization to accommodate growth and varied activity demands. Despite this potential, they remain underutilized in pediatric prosthetic development. This project addresses this gap by integrating patient-centered insights, mechanical testing, and advanced manufacturing to define design criteria for pediatric running-specific prostheses (RSPs). Research activities include the collection multidimensional data through surveys of children with lower-limb absence and their parents and clinicians. Statistical models will identify key predictors of prosthetic satisfaction and physical activity participation, while thematic analysis of open-ended responses will highlight subjective barriers and facilitators. Reported activities will be deconstructed into their underlying biomechanical demands and the mechanical behavior of three commercially available pediatric RSPs under static and dynamic loading will be evaluated. These tests will link stiffness and fatigue performance to user-specific anthropometric and movement data, informing predictive models of prosthetic response. Guided by these models, custom PAEPs using continuous fiber fused filament fabrication (CF-FFF), enhanced through Additive Fusion Technology (AFT) to improve structural integrity will be designed and fabricated. Mechanical evaluation of these devices will include standard tests, 3D digital image correlation for strain mapping, and micro-computed tomography for internal fiber analysis. The project will generate open-access models and fabrication protocols that advance personalized, high-performance pediatric PAEPs. Additionally, it will support STEM outreach through summer programs for children with limb differences and provide research training opportunities for undergraduates in biomechanics and digital manufacturing. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.