🦾 Prosthetics Engineering: Designing Solutions That Restore Movement

In this hands-on engineering unit, students become biomedical engineers and compassionate problem solvers, challenged to design, test, and improve prosthetic devices that help people regain movement and independence. Working in collaborative design teams, students move through the full engineering design process — from understanding a real human need to building, testing, redesigning, and communicating an effective solution.

Students explore how prosthetics work by investigating joints, levers, forces, and materials, while learning how engineers design within real-world constraints such as comfort, durability, cost, and usability. Through guided challenges, students test different designs for gripping, lifting, and movement, collecting data to evaluate how well their prosthetic models perform. Failure is treated as an essential part of learning, and students are encouraged to iterate and improve their designs using evidence and feedback.

The unit culminates in a Prosthetics Engineering Challenge, where teams present their final prosthetic prototypes, demonstrate how they function, and explain how their design choices meet the needs of a user—connecting their work to real-world biomedical engineering and accessibility.

Student Challenges Include:

📌 Defining a real-world problem related to limb loss or limited mobility
📌 Learning how bones, joints, and muscles work together to create movement
📌 Investigating forces, levers, and materials used in prosthetic design
📌 Designing and building a functional prosthetic hand or arm model
📌 Testing grip strength, movement, and control using data and observations
📌 Redesigning prototypes based on failure and performance data
📌 Communicating engineering ideas through sketches, models, and explanations
📌 Demonstrating empathy, collaboration, perseverance, and problem-solving

Final Products May Include:

A student engineering notebook or planning packet

Design sketches and labeled prosthetic diagrams

Tested and improved prosthetic prototypes

Data tables, testing results, and redesign reflections

A final presentation or Prosthetics Engineering Showcase

Learning Areas:

Engineering & Design • Life Science (Human Body Systems) • Physical Science (Forces & Motion) • Data Analysis • Problem Solving • Communication Skills • Collaboration & Empathy