Perpustakaan Digital ITB

In Indonesia, around one million people are amputees of the lower extremities. It is also notable that Indonesia itself as a currently underdeveloped country houses many people with lower-than-average purchasing power. For amputees, prosthetics are always one of the options that come to mind in order to be able to live a normal life, but however prosthetics can be very expensive. In the case of lower extremity prosthetics, one of the most complex parts of them is the knee. This research is done in order to fulfill the need of an affordable prosthetic option, with the prosthetic knee being at the focal point of it. Within the last leg of research done ITB’s Biomechanics Research Team, the developments made were done through a selection of designs, which improve on various aspects of the knee. Results of real-life usage of the prosthetic knee show different grades between said knees. In this research, the author aims to check whether those reports are valid through real-life experiments involving occupational biomechanics activities, involving a force plate. The experiments performed are, in gist, a comparison between the observed performances of normal subjects’ CoP ranges against an amputee doing several common occupational biomechanics activities. The obtained data were then filtered for outliers using boxplots, and tested for homogeneity using the Student’s t-test. The results were inconsistent with the final result of the previous research. While the previous questionnaire for the amputee yielded that the H1 knee is the best from the rest, with E1 and G1 being the same ranking, here, it can be seen more commonly that E1 is the best knee, followed by G1 and H1. This invalidates several parts of the previous research, and sheds new light on the whole arc of research so far. Recommendations for this research are to make sure a strict protocol is in place to ensure the accuracy and repeatability of the data obtained, and to add more observations to the experiment, including more amputees.