Blog

The two-day Conference on the Evolving Trends of Rehabilitation and Assistive Technologies was a hybrid conference held on the 25th and 26th of November 2021 at Hotel Africana, Kampala Uganda. There were over 200 individuals for both its virtual and physical attendance. Participants ranged from; stakeholders in Ugandan health sector, Ministry of Health, the National Medical Stores, academic researchers, medical professionals, orthopedic surgeons, Prosthetists, and Orthotists, to students and new personnel with a growing interest in the field. The Organizing Committee during the Conference on Evolving Trends in Rehabilitation and Assistive Technologies in Uganda The three sub-themes for this conference ...
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In common with our partners in Uganda and Jordan, the project teams in the UK have been working from home for several weeks now. While this presents some opportunities (no time lost in commuting, or travelling to meetings, and for me, glorious evening cycles along traffic-free roads in Manchester), it also undoubtedly presents challenges. At an individual level, those team members with young children are faced with the daily juggling of work and childcare/home schooling challenges. I suspect I am not alone in missing going to the pub – Indeed, one of the team, Mark Miodownik (@markmiodownik), is documenting on ...
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As an upcoming Biomedical Engineer, I was nurtured to design new technologies with an emphasis of fit-for-purpose and context. My Bachelor’s degree curriculum was very heavy on Engineering design which spanned 3 of the 4 years of study, completing at least 8 design projects in total. My Master’s degree curriculum was no different. It focused on the re-design of motorcycle helmets, the tools that are used to manufacture them, and the standards to which they adhere, to make them more affordable, comfortable and suitable for the Tropics. While my Masters degree studies were immensely useful in molding me into a ...
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Designing another upper limb prosthesis? Cue the undeserved praise now. Aside from the general public whose knowledge of a niche area of healthcare I can forgive, the doling out of awards and accolades to those designing a solution to a poorly understood problem continues. The source of this today is a slew of start up ventures that spend considerable amounts of time performing their social media blitz, and need to spend an equal amount of time (dare I say more time) learning about the prosthesis user experience. Uploading a new 3D printed hand to a cloud, with a design that ...
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Upper limb prosthetics has interested me since my graduation as a clinical prosthetist from the London School of Prosthetics in 1991. I worked as a prosthetist in Liverpool before becoming a lecturer at Salford, and now my research focuses on some of the issues that have frustrated people with upper limb absence and hindered upper limb prosthesis use and acceptance. The team here at Salford, and those who have joined us from elsewhere in the F4P project, have a keen mutual interest in resolving some of the problems associated with prosthesis use and control. My own PhD was focused on ...
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Our Ugandan team’s focus is multidisciplinary approach to health systems strengthening particularly medical devices. The overall head is Dr Erisa Mwaka, a senior lecturer at Makerere University and an orthopaedic surgeon. The team has plenty of Biomedical Engineers lead by Dr Robert Ssekitoleko. We have a Biomedical Engineering research assistant, Brenda Nakandi and two PhD students, Kenneth Rubango who started in May 2019 and Martha Mulerwa who started in February, 2019. Recently, we recruited six undergraduate Biomedical Engineering students to expose them to research experience help in building capacity of young engineers interested in developing appropriate rehabilitation technologies for low-and ...
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I can’t believe that the Fit-4-Purpose project has been going now for almost two years! Straight after my PhD with the Salford team, I joined the project in February 2018 as a Postdoctoral Researcher, with a background in Medical Engineering and Upper-limb prosthetics and I have been involved with various parts of the project ever since. In recent months I have been feeding into aspects of WP5 (led by the team at UCL) by analysing some upper-limb activity data recorded in Jordan and Uganda. But my main project has related to WP2 (led by our team here at Salford) and ...
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The 17th International Society of Prosthetics Congress was held in Kobe, Japan in October 2019. I attended and gave two presentations related to the work taking place in Uganda and Jordan. The theme was “Basics to Bionics”. My favourite sessions were related to outcome measures, developing countries, psychosocial issues, quality of life, prosthetics upper limb and assistive technologies against ageing society (although this theme would have been better if it was assistive technology for older age or elderly). I was slightly disappointed to see that more than 60% of efforts are still directed to highly technological prosthetics, which remain inaccessible ...
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I am a prosthetics and orthotics graduate, currently working at the University of Jordan with Dr. Mohammad Sobuh as a research assistant on the Fit4Purpose project. In this project, we are collaborating with our partners from the UCL, University of Southampton, University of Portsmouth, University of Salford and Makerere University (Uganda). In order to make sure that our hand and socket meet the needs of the prosthetic users we are talking to people in Jordan with upper limb loss.  There are no statistics showing how many upper limb amputees there are in Jordan, but my best estimate is that there ...
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One of the key elements of the Fit 4 Purpose project is that any upper limb prosthesis that is developed is able to be manufactured from locally sourced materials in LMICs where possible. This approach has a number of significant potential benefits over relying on imported materials and components. Locally sourced materials should in principle end up reducing the cost of production of a device since there is no need for long distance shipping, therefore also reducing the cost to the end user. With the cost of a prosthetic limb being one of the major barriers for the vast majority ...
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I am the Academic Director of the Global Disability Innovation Hub  (https://www.disabilityinnovation.com) which was founded on the back of the London 2012 Paralympic Games – the most successful in the history of the Games. My role in Fit for Purpose is to explore user experiences and develop better prosthetic interfaces, including activity monitoring sensing.  I lead two studies in Uganda and Jordan with the help of the brilliant Dafne Morgado-Ramirez and the Maggie Donovan-Hall. The first study is utilising wrist-worn activity monitors and ethnographic methods to understand the use or non-use of upper limb prosthetics. We also measure the context ...
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The School of Energy and Electronic Engineering at the University of Portsmouth is looking for a highly motivated Research Fellow to work on the Fit for Purpose, Affordable Body-Powered Prostheses project. This is an opportunity to work on an exciting biomedical engineering project and implement your findings with experts in Uganda and Jordan, with direct benefits to people with limb loss. Join an interdisciplinary research team of biomedical engineers, prosthetists, healthcare psychologists and social scientists working on designs of prosthetic arms in Lower and Middle Income Countries (LMICs).  They will work primarily with Professor Peter Kyberd in Portsmouth and Professors Laurence Kenney ...
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My clinical experience is mainly in upper limb prosthetics and at the University of Jordan I train orthotic and prosthetic students on how to fabricate prostheses for all upper limb amputation levels. However, I have been always skeptical about the functional benefit of current devices, so the exciting early work in this project offers an excellent opportunity to find out whether Jordanian amputees actually make use of their prescribed prostheses in everyday life and to understand the amputee’s perspectives of “a usable prosthesis”. We are working on these problems with the UCL, University of Southampton, University of Salford and Makerere ...
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  My background is in health psychology and I currently work as an Associate Professor in the School of Health Sciences.  I am interested in the psycho social issues related to rehabilitation and I have had a particular interest in the area of prosthetics and orthotics since completing my MSc back in 1999.  My role in this project is to ensure that the user’s needs are integrated into the development of any new prosthetic componentry.  When we are referring to the user, we do not just mean the person with limb loss, but the wider group of stakeholders that are involved ...
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The School of Energy and Electronic Engineering at the University of Portsmouth is seeking to appoint an engineer to work with Peter Kyberd on the project. The role of the engineer in Portsmouth will be to look at exploring novel approaches to the technology, aiming to realise a step change in body powered prosthesis performance. We are therefore looking for an innovative mechanical engineer with substantial experience in design and construction of small mechanisms (e.g. prosthetic hands, robot manipulators), including 3D printing and hydraulics, who has worked creatively on their own design projects. The post is based in the School ...
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We are around two weeks away from the Trent International Prosthetics Symposium  and UK ISPO/BACPAR National Members Society Annual Scientific Meeting, being held at The Lowry, here in Salford. As one of the conference Chairs, life is pretty hectic just now, but thought it worth letting you know about the project-related work being presented. On Thursday 21st March, Maggie Donovan-Hall will be presenting the user involvement work that she has been carrying out with partners in Uganda and Jordan, as well as interviews with experienced clinicians working for ICRC. The impact of Maggie’s work will be felt well beyond the ...
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About me I studied mechanical engineering at the University of Salford in the mid-1980s. Central Salford in those days was very different – the legendary Smiths were in their prime, the local coal mine was still operating, and the Salford docks (now the site of Media City) had just closed; there certainly were no trendy coffee shops or luxury flats! I stayed on to complete a PhD, then following postdoc work at Salford and a period working at Roessingh Research and Development in the Netherlands, returned in 2000 to take up a permanent post in the new health faculty. The ...
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