Leg bank - provides life-changing prosthetics for people who have lost limbs to land mines.

A ‘leg bank’ that will provide prosthetic legs to people who have lost their limbs through land mines and diabetes is being developed by a team including researchers from the University of Strathclyde.The idea is to offer high-quality artificial legs to people who have lost limbs from injury and disease for free - in places like Colombia where more than 10,000 people have been killed or maimed by land mines since 1990.

The idea was inspired by a surgeon in Thailand who became frustrated by the lack of access to well-made prostheses - so he made his own using plastic bottle caps. The leg bank relies on a technology called Majicast, that makes it easy to produce well-fitting prosthetics - something that traditionally requires very specialist - and therefore expensive - practitioners. The system involves putting the stump into a tank of water instead of plaster casts to find the perfect fit for a prosthesis. The water-based system helps doctors work out the perfect design for the most comfortable - and long-lasting - fake leg. The University of Strathclyde’s biomedical engineer Dr Arjan Buis says that 90% of people who have received limbs in tests so far are “very happy”.

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