Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh – The sound of children at play echoes through the verdant lanes of one of the dozens of refugee camps on the outskirts of Cox's Bazar, a densely populated coastal town in southeast Bangladesh. Just for a moment, the sounds manage to soften the harsh living conditions faced by the more than one million people who live here in the world's largest refugee camp. Described as the most persecuted people on the planet, the Rohingya Muslim refugees in Bangladesh may now be one of the most forgotten populations in the world, eight years after being ethnically cleansed from their homes in neighbouring Myanmar by a predominantely Buddhist military regime. "Cox's Bazar is ground zero for the impact of budget cuts on people in desperate need," UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said during a visit to the sprawling camps in May. The UN chief's visit followed United States President Donald Trump's gutting of the US Agency for International Development (USAID), which has stalled several key projects in the camps, and the United Kingdom announcing cuts to foreign aid in order to increase defence spending.

The approach combines the natural coordination patterns of our fingers with the decoding of motoneuron activity in the spinal column. Recent advancements in technology have revolutionized the world of assistive and medical tools, and prosthetic limbs are no exception. We've come a long way from the rigid, purely cosmetic prosthetics of the past. Today, we're seeing the rise of softer, more realistic designs, many incorporating robotic components that significantly expand their functionality. Despite these exciting developments, a major challenge remains: How do we make these robotic limbs easier and more intuitive for users to control?

Small obstacles on the ground often lead to a fall when caught with commercial prosthetic feet. Despite some recently developed feet can actively control the ankle angle, for instance over slopes, their flat and rigid sole remains a cause of instability on uneven grounds. Soft robotic feet were recently proposed to tackle that issue; however, they lack consistent experimental validation. Therefore, this paper describes the experimental setup realized to test soft and rigid prosthetic feet with lower-limb prosthetic users. It includes a wooden walkway and differently shaped obstacles. It was preliminary validated with an able-bodied subject, the same subject walking on commercial prostheses through modified walking boots, and with a prosthetic user. They performed walking firstly on even ground, and secondly on even ground stepping on one of the obstacles. Results in terms of vertical ground reaction force and knee moments in both the sagittal and frontal planes show how the poor performance of commonly used prostheses is exacerbated in case of obstacles. The prosthetic user, indeed, noticeably relies on the sound leg to compensate for the stiff and unstable interaction of the prosthetic limb with the obstacle. Therefore, since the limitations of non-adaptive prosthetic feet in obstacle-dealing emerge from the experiments, as expected, this study justifies the use of the setup for investigating the performance of soft feet on uneven grounds and obstacle negotiation.

The application of 2D markerless gait analysis has garnered increasing interest and application within clinical settings. However, its effectiveness in the realm of lower-limb amputees has remained less than optimal. In response, this study introduces an innovative zero-shot method employing image generation diffusion models to achieve markerless pose estimation for lower-limb prosthetics, presenting a promising solution to gait analysis for this specific population. Our approach demonstrates an enhancement in detecting key points on prosthetic limbs over existing methods, and enables clinicians to gain invaluable insights into the kinematics of lower-limb amputees across the gait cycle. The outcomes obtained not only serve as a proof-of-concept for the feasibility of this zero-shot approach but also underscore its potential in advancing rehabilitation through gait analysis for this unique population.

Azaz, Syria – With her smile as bright as ever, 15-year-old Rima Haj Hussein nervously walks into the Ataa Rehabilitation and Prosthetic Limb Centre for earthquake and war victims in Azaz, a town in northern Syria's Aleppo governorate. She recently celebrated passing her preparatory level exams, and her pride in pushing through after losing her leg in the massive earthquakes that hit southern Turkey and northern Syria six months ago is apparent. "When the exam results were announced, I was especially happy that I fulfilled a part of my father's wish for me. He always encouraged me to continue my education," she said. Rima had spent two months in a hospital near the Turkish border, asking her surviving family where her father was.

A neuroscience researcher responds to Jonathan Parks-Ramage's "The Preschool." There's a famous saying, often credited to Isaac Asimov, that "today's science fiction is tomorrow's science fact." Whoever said it, they weren't wrong. The Dick Tracy two-way wrist radio is now commonplace, the Jetsons' videophone is ubiquitous (and more compact), and stun guns are often carried by police officers--although they never say "Set your phasers on stun." Today's science fiction is chock-full of ideas that are not yet fully realized, such as interstellar exploration, time travel, alien communication, teleportation, and cybernetics.

Something built to blend into a society where people have all of their limbs while serving functional use cases. On the other end of the spectrum are the highly optimized prosthetics used by Athletes, built for speed, low weight, and appearing nothing like a human limb. As a child under 12 years old, neither of these categories of prosthetics particularly speaks to you. Open Bionics, founded by Joel Gibbard and Samantha Payne, was started to create a third category of prosthetics. One that targets the fun, imaginative side of children, while still providing the daily functional requirements.

A small, bead-like magnet used in a new approach to measuring muscle position. Using a simple set of magnets, MIT researchers have come up with a sophisticated way to monitor muscle movements, which they hope will make it easier for people with amputations to control their prosthetic limbs. In a new pair of papers, the researchers demonstrated the accuracy and safety of their magnet-based system, which can track the length of muscles during movement. The studies, performed in animals, offer hope that this strategy could be used to help people with prosthetic devices control them in a way that more closely mimics natural limb movement. "These recent results demonstrate that this tool can be used outside the lab to track muscle movement during natural activity, and they also suggest that the magnetic implants are stable and biocompatible and that they don't cause discomfort," says Cameron Taylor, an MIT research scientist and co-lead author of both papers.

Decades ago, a civil war in Sierra Leone left thousands as amputees. Researcher and current Education Minister David Moinina Sengeh set out to help them with a more comfortable socket for prostheses. David Moinina Sengeh is a biomechatronics engineer and the current Minister of Education and Chief Innovation Officer in his home country of Sierra Leone. He pioneered a new system for creating prosthetic sockets, which fit a prosthetic leg onto a patient's residual limb. Using multiple technologies, Sengeh created sockets that are far more comfortable than traditional ones, and can be produced cheaply and quickly.

With the growth of artificial intelligence and machine learning in healthcare, even prosthetic limbs are becoming smart. These smart prosthetics can combine manual control with machine learning for more accessible and effective use. We are seeing a growth of machine learning in healthcare, where it is used to improve a patient's overall health, including providing accurate diagnosis and better treatment plans. Additionally, machine learning (ML) can also understand healthcare data by improving diagnostics and predicting accurate outcomes. One of the latest fields where AI and ML have been making an impact is prosthetics.