A Legbank for Colombia

Impact: Impact - for External Portal › Health and welfare - new products, guidelines and services, Economic and commerce

Who is affected

Persons with a lower limb amputation

Narrative

The main goal of the project is to develop a desirable, feasible and viable social business concept for affordable and high quality prostheses, to make prostheses more accessible the Base of the Pyramid in Colombia.During the project we focus on:1. Affordability & high quality2. Accessibility3. Service-system and business model innovation (or feasibility within Colombian health system)The project duration lasts five months, in which we combine field research in Colombia with our technical knowledge. The end result will be a working prototype with a strategic plan including a business model.Three people from the team have already spent four weeks in Colombia conducting field research to determine where the real problems lie. We spoke to doctors, amputees, prosthetic technicians and centres, insurance companies and other stakeholders in order to gain a deep understanding of the context.Now we need to send three people from our team to Colombia to test and validate our product-service system designs with amputees, technicians and doctors, in the context for which it is designed. From the 19th of December, we are sending three team members to Colombia with a prototype that has a new technology from Strathclyde University Scotland, which has been tested in Iraq and Afghanistan. This technology allows amputees to get a better-fitting socket that can be made within one day, which means that amputees could return to their family and work sooner than that the current process allows. Our design is a product-service system that is supported by this technology.
Impact statusOpen
Category of impactHealth and welfare - new products, guidelines and services, Economic and commerce
Impact levelEngagement

Keywords

  • prosthetics
  • low income countries
  • rehabilitation
  • economic sustainability
  • pressure casting
  • education

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