Stéphane Bédard Founder of Victhom Human Bionics Quebec City
There are 335,000 above-the-knee amputees in the U.S. and Canada, and that number increases by about 5% a year, mainly the result of bone cancer and diabetes. By training, I'm an electrical engineer with a master's in mechanical engineering, and I'm working on a PhD in mechatronics at Université Laval. I met a lot of amputees while I was in rehab-I'm a former mountain biker at the national level, and I've had three operations on my left knee.
We're able to go to the moon, but all we can do for amputees is this very basic mechanical stuff. It's astonishing. A conventional prosthesis is passive-that means it's controlled entirely by the amputee, with the stump. You pay the price for that with each step. You have to expend a lot of energy to walk, and it can be extremely painful. It takes three to four months to learn how to use one, but it's the only way you're going to walk again.
Our product is an active prosthesis-the first one on the market. It walks with you. Sensors on the good leg send information to an artificial intelligence module on the prosthesis, which recognizes the amputee's walking pattern. If he starts to sit down, the AI recognizes his intention and mobilizes the prosthesis. If the person starts to climb stairs, the motion of the prosthesis changes. It takes from just three hours to three weeks to learn how to use it.
When I started, one option was to build a lab at Laval dedicated to biomechatronic devices, but that would have taken years. I decided to go the corporate route. When I trusted myself as a businessman, I approached investors. I hired my first employee-my assistant-in 2001. Then I started to build a team of 40 or 50 people and came up with a game plan: to complete a prototype of the bionic leg in three years. Now we're in the precommercialization phase, with 50 people testing Victhom's leg in Europe and North America.
Already we're working on the next-generation prosthesis. The third generation will be partially connected to the nervous system via a neuro implant.
We're proud of what we've developed. Yeah, it's a bunch of technology, but at the end of it, we're changing life for a lot of people. We give them autonomy. That's something we never forget.