Hugh Herr isn’t just developing more capable prosthetic limbs. He’s rethinking what humans can do.

Josh SandbergOctober 23, 2014

3,722 3 minutes read

By Courtney Humphries, SM ’04 on October 21, 2014

Uncomfortable shoes. Awkward crutches. Painful artificial limbs. When technology meets biology, the interface is rarely flawless—and the devices often hinder the bodies they are supposed to help. Hugh Herr, SM ’93, believes that technologists can do better. An associate professor of media arts and sciences and leader of the Biomechatronics Group in MIT’s Media Lab, Herr is building sophisticated devices that aid human movement by mimicking nature.

In March, Herr gave a headline-grabbing TED talk about work in his lab to create a special prosthesis that allowed Adrianne Haslet-Davis, a dancer whose leg was partially amputated after the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings, to execute a rumba for the audience. But more than highlighting a single project, Herr’s talk invited the public into his larger vision: a world in which technology erases disability, and in which the synthetic and biological worlds meld seamlessly.

It’s unusual to find a researcher whose work and personal history are so entwined, and not just because Herr, himself a double amputee, now walks on bionic legs that his lab designed. As both a rock climber and a user of prostheses, Herr has direct experience with frustratingly poor prosthetic designs—and an athlete’s determination to overcome them. His lab is working to understand the tricks the human body uses for moving efficiently, and then translating that knowledge into robotic devices that can not only restore function to those who have lost it but enhance normal human capabilities.

“Imagine 50 years from now, with truly advanced bionic technologies, [if] you want a third arm, you can have a third arm,” he says. “That’s cool.”

A Redirected Passion
Herr, 50, describes himself as a focused person, and he speaks with a solemnity that makes it easy for people to miss his dry humor. When he was young, that intense focus was directed at one thing: climbing. “My singular objective was to be the best climber in the world,” he says. His academic interests were, he readily admits, nonexistent. In 1982, when he was 17, Herr and a friend were caught in a blizzard while climbing Mount Washington in New Hampshire. They were stranded for three nights before being rescued; one man who was trying to rescue them died. Herr’s frostbitten legs were amputated below the knees.

“It’s alarming to every person who first receives an artificial limb how low-tech and archaic the technology is—certainly back then,” he says. His first prostheses were temporary ones with plaster sockets, and he was instructed not to walk without crutches or another support: the plaster would shatter under his full weight. Later he got permanent prostheses made of wood, rubber, and plastic, but they were stiff and painful.

Yet Herr found that he could still excel in the vertical world of rock climbing. In high school, he had trained in tool and die machining at a vocational school; shortly after returning home from the hospital, he set up a workshop in the garage and put those skills to work designing and building his own prosthetic limbs for rock and ice climbing. Climbing is a sport in which the typical human body can feel awkward, as anyone who has tried to balance on a small foothold or wedge a foot into a crack can attest. So Herr’s designs didn’t look like feet at all. “I quickly abandoned this notion that the prosthesis has to look like a human limb, and I started to think: what’s optimal, what’s best for function?” he says. He created tiny feet that could balance on a whisper-thin ledge, and hatchetlike blades that could fit into a crack.

Soon enough, Herr began climbing harder routes than he’d mastered before his accident. “That was deeply inspiring,” he says. “I had never appreciated the capacity of technology to change an individual’s life so precipitously.” The obvious career path he might have taken, working in his father’s house-building business, was no longer an option for him, and he now had a vested interest in making artificial limbs better. So although Herr had never intended to go to college, a few years after his accident he decided to give it a try, earning a bachelor’s degree in physics at Millersville University in Pennsylvania at age 25. “It replaced my passion for climbing,” he says. “In two years I went from not being able to take 10 percent of a hundred to studying graduate-level quantum mechanics.” While at Millersville he also got his first patent, for a prosthetic socket designed with fluid bladders for better comfort.

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Hugh Herr isn’t just developing more capable prosthetic limbs. He’s rethinking what humans can do.

Josh Sandberg

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