Students design prosthetic foot for young swimmer

My name's Hadley. I love everything about swimming. We've had Hadley in the water since she was born, yeah. She loves to be in the water. We've been going to the ocean since she was four weeks old. When I was born, I had a leg deformity, and I had to have a surgery, and I got my first prosthetic when I was one years old. me and my mom have really been kind of on a mission to find a way to make that area of her life easier of course she wants to do everything that your average normal kid does swimming has definitely been one area that has been more difficult my mom found the virginia tech biomedical engineering school we went up and we met with the team growing up my mom had a friend who lost her leg to cancer and she was like an avid horse rider and that really resonated with me because I was a horse rider growing up but there was a team of engineers that designed a saddle for her so she could still ride despite having a prosthetic. She was still able to pursue that hobby of hers and participate in that love that she had something that I wanted to be able to give to someone else with my career path. They just kind of heard her complaints and what she was looking for in a leg. Hadley wanted a foot that could support her walking and swimming. So we ran a lot of tests on force loading. We needed to make sure that our foot could support her weight and then also be able to generate enough force when she's swimming in the water that she's able to propel herself forward. We did a lot of slip testing, durability testing. We wanted to make sure that her prosthetic made it safe for her to use around the poolside. She typically just takes her leg off and hops around the pool and that leads to you know clumsy accidents and when she's at like parties and stuff and there's like you know climbing like floats and different things like that she really struggled navigating those. Our primary faculty advisor was Dr. Andy Mjolnir with the biomedical engineering department. We also consulted with Ian Ho who became another one of our project mentors. He's an Olympic swimmer and mechanical engineering PhD student. I've been swimming since the age of four. Swam for Virginia Tech for four years, qualified for the Tokyo Olympics, came back here, continued grad school, and I've been swimming ever since. When she described it, I was like, swimming plus manufacturing, like, I would love to help out. To build a functional product, much less for someone who needs it or for a good cause, has been a lot of fun. Our original design was going to be the whole prosthetic, but we quickly realized we did not have the resources to perfectly get one molded to her that would be like biomechanically appropriate. So we use that to pivot our project and focus a lot more on what we can do specifically at the ankle joint. As you get older, there are more options for prosthetics because there's less growth. When they're a kid, it's not as big of an option because they're growing so rapidly. What we ended up designing was just a foot attachment that can attach to her prosthetic. With this just being a foot attachment, that in and of itself is a huge plus because it's something that hopefully we can carry on even with her future legs. This just, you know, opens the door for more options, not even just for her, but other kids that might be in a similar situation. This foot has really kind of given her the option to be more viable in the water and on the land. Thank you, Virginia Tech, for, you know, providing this opportunity for Hadley and giving her another option to give herself a little bit of more normal life. I got this one foot from Virginia Tech. Thank you.