Engineering the extraordinary

But Sunday's semifinal heat of the 400 m sprint in the London Olympic Games took it to a whole new level. There, Oscar Pistorius of South Africa raced into history on his Cheetah prosthetics, a double amputee running side-by-side with the general-classification athletes.Forget about the Bionic Man. Technology is steadily offering ever more amazing solutions to address disabilities. With his carbon fiber prosthetics, Pistorius was able to not only qualify for the Olympics as a whole but to beat multiple able-bodied runners to transfer into the semifinals.

Chennai Engineering CollegesMore than anything, that's a tribute to the talent, determination, and skill of Pistorius, but he couldn't have done it without the right equipment. Without the right engineering. Compare his Cheetahs to the prosthetics available 20 years ago. Think about how rapidly materials, controls, and embedded technology are advancing—I don't know about you, but the thought of future gives me chills.

Engineering GraduationOf course the future is today in many places. Cheetah manufacturer Össur offers a range of sophisticated options such as active knees and even complete bionic legs. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab, professor Hugh Herr and his bioengineering group are hard at work on a powered ankle-foot prosthetic that uses flexures and servo motors to add spring to the stride of amputees. The team developed an elastic actuator that harvests energy during the heel-strike portion of the stride, to release it in the next step. Instead of losing energy in the process of walking, users actually gained.