The interest on bionics first shined through when I came across a TED talk video of Dr. Hugh Herr on 2014/15. Hugh, who is a bilateral amputee and a professor at the MIT tells his story. It is immensely inspiring how he took on his life after the accident. He is pushing technology forward to enable better bionics, which help himself and others.

It's impossible to ignore the fact that during the whole talk, he is wearing two bionic limbs, which he proudly shows off. Being 16 years old at the time, I couldn't stop thinking, "how cool!". The BiOMs are able to produce power on their own, and assist him during walking and a small run test, just as if he had both his biological legs intact.

On a more recent date, a video telling the story of Everett Lawson, a research assistant at the MIT Media Lab, came up on my YouTube feed. Of course, with such a title, I had to watch it. Everett's life story and his commitment to create better technology are equally inspiring.

At one time in the video, Prof. Hugh Herr, Director of the Biomechatronics Group is introduced. The same man from that 2014 video!

Several prototypes from the Biomechatronics Group are shown which have varying sizes, designs and mechanisms. It pretty much looks like a shelf of movie props, kind of for a sci-fi movie.

Matt Carney, at the moment a PhD candidate at the MIT Biomechatronics Group participates in the video presenting his thesis work, a bionic actuator configurable as a knee and/or ankle prosthesis, for which Everett was a testing subject. His work included hobby grade brushless motors, ball screws, electronics, components which looked quite familiar to myself.

After this I began getting into topic, reading Matt's thesis, previous work from Hugh, and getting to know a bit more on the prosthetics world. What's available, what are the costs, how does Matt's work compare, different levels of functionality were all questions that popped up.

Other institutes such as the University of Michigan and UT Dallas have their work on this subject as well. In the following video, Eng. Chris Nesler and PhD student Kevin Best demo a robotic prosthetic leg. It was developed at the Locomotor Control Systems Lab under the direction of Prof. Robert Gregg.

I've been working on hobby robotics projects for quite some time, built UAVs, wheeled and tracked robots and have used several of the components I had seen on videos (of course much much more hobby grade than what Matt used). Being familiar with the technology and seeing the impact of such projects made me wonder if I could make something affordable out of known and previously used components.

The idea of attempting to make a bionic prosthesis kept growing on me.