Impact:para-sports

Italy has been home to Paralympic sports since their infancy, when Antonio Maglio, Medical Director of the INAIL Paraplegic Center Villa Maria di Osti, organized the first Paralympic Games in Rome in 1960. Over the years, the paralympic movement has grown and with it the importance of a multidisciplinary approach to support athletes for improving their performance and preserving their health, with contributions from the bioengineering community. Following this need, INAIL and the University of Padova started the Olympia Project, a scientific collaboration to develop new methods and instruments to help prosthetists, trainers, and athletes in their commitment to fabricate, validate and take full advantage of innovative custom-made sport-specific artificial limbs. The aim of this chapter is to report three examples of the activities currently underway, which can best represent the board spectrum of applications of bioengineering principles. These include 1) the definition and testing of a new set-up for the sprinting prosthesis of athletes with transfemoral amputation, 2) the initial development of a wearable device to measure loads in sprinting prostheses, 3) the activities aiming to define a standardized method for socket mechanical testing.