Business Opportunities Weblog

July 5, 2008 by Nicholas | 3 Comments

Iht.com:

In 1976, when Oscar Pistorius, the double-amputee sprinter from South Africa, was 21, his left leg was severed below the knee in a water-skiing accident. At the hospital, he was measured for a pink wood-and-rubber leg and sent home. A former athlete, Phillips said it felt “like a sentence from hell.”

Phillips said he became obsessed with creating a better prosthetic leg. When he was a student at the Northwestern University Medical School Prosthetic-Orthotic Center, professors discouraged him from challenging the status quo, he said. He learned that the artificial limb industry had changed little since World War II and the Korean War. Most prosthetics were designed within the cosmetic envelope — a prosthetic foot resembled the human foot. There was no energy to propel a leg.

Borrowing concepts from pole vaulting, the spring of a diving board and the C shape of a Chinese sword his father owned, Phillips imagined a prosthetic that would let him jump and land. The day after Phillips first ran down a hallway wearing his invention, he quit his job, found partners and started a company, turning his basement into a lab. He would make a leg, break it and refine it, churning out 100 legs in two years.

In 2000, Phillips sold his business to Ossur, a prosthetic and orthotic company based in Iceland, which continues to sell the Cheetah and other Phillips designs. Its chief executive, Jon Sigurdsson, called Phillips “a visionary, whose ideas and progressive techniques are central to our heritage.”

Image via Iht

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