Diversability CELEBRATING THE ACHIEVEMENTS OF PEOPLE WITH DISABILITIES Amputee Assistance RIT researcher’s invention of a flexible limb socket helps people in Haiti BY SARAH PRAGER JADE MYERS WAS ADMITTEDLY Myers with members of her team at Rochester Institute of Technology. ▲ unprepared when she traveled to South Africa for a weeklong convention, fresh out of undergrad with four days’ notice. “We were excited about 3D print-ing and thinking about all of the different possibilities for assistive devices and things like that,” Myers says. “But we were definitely very na-ive about some of the clinical aspects of the needs for prosthetic devices.” Myers and her supervisor at the lab where she worked on creating prostheses were teaming up with a nonprofit for the length of the conference. The goal was to create an upper limb prosthesis for a young South African woman by the end of the week and 3D print it for her. Myers learned a career-changing lesson from the approach she brought to that project. “I was very naive about the sociocultural needs for devices,” Myers explains. She arrived and gave a speech about how a prosthetic arm could give someone the independence to tie their shoes but learned over the course of the week that many people in the area she was meant to serve didn’t have shoes … or didn’t have feet because of the prevalence of land mines. “It was a learning experience that was very humbling,” Myers says. “That kind of shifted my trajectory when it came to how I was going to approach design for these.” Since that formative week in South Africa at the beginning of her career, Myers has made it a point to listen to device users first and create her designs based on their needs, not come into a community already telling them what they want. She learned that the highest need for prostheses is in low-resource regions — 80% of the millions of people who could potentially benefit from a prosthetic device live in low-income countries, but as low as 5% of people who could use one actually have access to a device, according to a study by Colette S. Harkins, Anthony McGarry and Arjan Buis. Myers has been collaborating with people in Haiti to create pros-theses for Haitians since January 2017. Everything she does is in-formed by the reality of the people she serves and the people she works with, not a factory setting of what the latest technology could be under imaginary conditions. “Oftentimes, people try to make these really complex myoelectric versions that really aren’t that help-ful and they’re super expensive,” Myers explains. “Maybe someone just needs to stabilize something so that they can write or a single task like that.” She says that prosthesis ▲ Jade Myers displays the prosthetic device she developed in collaboration with people in Haiti to create devices that resemble human limbs to avoid the social stigma of amputation. without whirring gadgets tend to be the ones that actually get used: “In life, when people have a choice be-tween their fancier myoelectric one and a body-powered one, often they go for the body-powered because it’s just easier. It works right away — they don’t have to wait for the device to catch up before they can turn a doorknob or something like that.” Myers has learned that people living in Haiti often want devices that look more like human limbs than a robotic look because of the social stigma of amputation. Lighter devices with more stable sockets are also important to users in low-resource regions. Being able to wear them longer is important to make them practical for use, and those two factors make that possible. That’s why the flexible limb socket 34 Diversity in Action | JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2023 PHOTOS COURTESY OF JADE MYERS
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