Essay on The ReMotion Prosthetic Knee - 1708 Words

The ReMotion Prosthetic Knee ReMotion is a project created by D-Rev (Design Revolution), a not for profit organization working in third world countries, which creates and supplies prosthetic knees to amputees living on under $4 a day (Krista Donaldson, 2013). One of the company’s major constraints when designing the knee revolved around creating a product that performed at a standard equivalent to the high end prosthetic knees, but at a cost that was affordable and allowed for mass production. The project has been running since 2009 (Krista Donaldson, 2013) and over five and a half thousand amputees have since been fitted with the ReMotion knee, with the third version being made publicly available mid 2014 (‘A Cheap Prosthetic Knee For†¦show more content†¦It can also involve making sketches of a product, recording data, computing that data to ensure it matches with specifications, analyzing results and writing reports. Designing products is additional part of the specific engineering disci pline. This however is likely to a small component compared to the testing and eliminating of production problems aspect. Major decisions would have to be decided on and resolved throughout the process of designing and implementing the knee. Part of D-Rev’s design ideal revolved around creating a high-end prosthetic knee that could be produced at a lower cost. Previous cheap alternatives for prosthetic joints and limbs greatly traded efficiency for a lower cost. While D-Rev would have aimed to avoid this trade-off between quality and cost, it is likely to remain imbalanced. Of course, the quality could have been lifted to a higher standard, but the cost would have been raised too, thus defeating their purpose of making a quality and cheap product. Another major decision revolved around maintaining quality with a simplistic design. By keeping everything straightforward, it allows for easy fitting and repairing of the joints without extensive training. While this may decrease the quality, it increases the practically as it takes lower qualifications to fit the product to the amputee and can easily occur in their home country. The