Caring for a Three Legged Dog or Cat
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Hi! My name is Amritha, and I'm currently designing and building prosthetic limbs for dogs in my high school engineering capstone class. To begin this process, I need some input Tripawds bloggers! If you have the time, I would really appreciate it if you take the survey linked below. It's very short and will only take a couple of minutes! At this moment, I am at the designing/ researching phase. As in, I'm learning about animal prosthetics , canine anatomy, and dog rehabilitation, creating my demands and wishes for my model, and starting my initial sketches. Shortly, we will be creating models and prototypes, and, finally, will have finished products by May/June. My purpose is to create a dog prosthetic that is innovative in some kind of way, whether it be in design or how it attaches to the limb or in cost effectiveness. As many dogs do relatively well without a prosthetic or may not adapt to one, I realize that in the best case scenario, a dog would receive a prosthetic right after his or her amputation. As far as the survey, it doesn't get into the specifics much. It just gathers the feelings dog-owners have about prosthetics and how much you willing to give them a chance if it were an option. My main goal with this project is to create a prosthetic that is just as functional as a current prosthetic, but much more cost effective, as I am aware of how extremely expensive prosthetics are. It would be amazing to create a prosthetic that is widely accessible and, after analyzing the dog's body structure, able to conform perfectly to the anatomy, whether there be a large stump left or none at all. To accomplish this, I would really appreciate your thoughts! Thank you! |
Hi Amritha!
As I mentioned in our emails, I'm so impressed with the research and effort you're putting into this project. You are wise beyond your years!
Two questions for you:
1) can our feline friends answer this survey too? We do have quite a few "TriKitty" members here and I'm sure they would love to share their thoughts as well. Understandable though if this project is only about dogs, just let us know.
2) what is the deadline for the survey?
Thanks again. I'm hopping over there now to answer the survey.
FYI just to clarify a few things about prosthetics . New members, if you click on the "prosthetics " link you'll find the information we currently know about prosthetics for animals. With the technology currently available, the decision about whether or not to use an artificial limb has to be made before the amputation surgery. That's so the animal has enough stump for the prosthesis to attach to. We know many people try them regardless, but we don't know the long-term success rate of artificial limbs used on animals who have no stump. It would be interesting to find and read any examples out there.
Implanted artificial limbs are on the horizon for those animals who don't have enough stump, but widespread implementation of that method is a ways off as far as I know. With talented researchers like Amritha out there, hopefully it won't be too long before we can have more options for animal amputees who don't have enough stump for today's technologies.
One more point of clarification: as OrthoPets states in the article about DIY prosthetics for animals, we don't encourage people to try these projects on their own without the assistance of designers knowledgeable in the field animal biomechanics (movement).
Tripawds Founders Jim and Rene
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