Cybathlon Rehearsal in Zurich

On July 11th, 2015, three members of M.A.S.S. Impact departed for the first-ever Cybathlon Rehearsal in Zurich, Switzerland. The mock competition was help at the Kopien Arena and a total of 30 teams representing 15 countries attended, 5 of which were competing in the arm prosthesis discipline. M.A.S.S. Impact was the only team representing Canada.

The rehearsal provided a great opportunity to see what other teams have been working on and to share thoughts on different approaches to addressing the current challenges in the field of upper-limb prostheses. We were able to impress our colleagues and the judges with the functionality of our technology, and were pleasantly well received by the community, in addition, we were able to provide input on the structure of tasks to align with R&D to enhance the quality of life of the users of the devices. M.A.S.S. Impact is determined to reach the goal of developing a robotic upper limb prosthesis control interfeace that will be intuitive to use by individuals, and robust enough to break out of the research environment into an everyday setting.

With only 3 days of practice with the socket and prosthesis, Danny, our pilot, performed well beyond our expectations and adapted quickly to the technology. There are definitely a lot of things to work on but this has really reassured our goal of an intuitive and minimally trained product. All in all, it was a very helpful trip and it was a pleasure to meet the other teams in our discipline as well as the organizers at ETH.