A New Proposed Method to Reverse Engineer a Residual Limb for Prosthetic Socket - Procedure, Advantages and Challenges

A prosthetic replaces any missing human body part visibly and also aims to resume the normal functionality of the part. Reverse engineering extracts information from a present model or available design and develops a new model using advanced CAD tools. Nowadays the reverse engineered part can be combined with rapid prototyping by various software and integration of CAD-CAM platforms. In this paper, a new method to reverse engineer the residual limb information for lower limb amputees, in order to use it for analyzing and developing a prosthetic socket by scanning and developing a CAD model is proposed. Along this are discussed, the advantages and challenges. This work falls in the emerging field of interdisciplinary engineering, combining medical and advanced mechanical engineering on a humanitarian platform