How much does a prosthetic cost?

Choosing a Prosthesis can be daunting and expensive and because every prosthesis is unique to the individual, final costs can be quite varied and w

e would be very happy to offer an appointment to talk about working with you to find the best prosthetic solution for you.

With competitive price and timely delivery, PFC sincerely hope to be your supplier and partner.

During this appointment we will get a chance to talk to you about your needs and form an idea of some of the possible ways we might be able to help you and we would also be able to give you an informal indication of their associated costs, including conditions of warranty and guarantee. You might want to discuss our easy payments or installment options as well.

Can I bring a friend?

Family and those who care about you are welcome to attend the initial assessment and subsequent fitting appointments, but we would ask that numbers be restricted to two extra attendees.

Do I pay each time I see you?

You will not be charged for follow-up appointments during the three months following delivery of your first designprosthetics prosthesis. After this there is a fee for continuing care to maintain comfort and function. Each subsequent new limb or socket change is eligible for free follow up appointments for three months after delivery.

Throughout the process of providing you with your prosthesis, key milestones will be agreed and signed off. At no time will you be asked to accept a milestone sign-off without the full agreement of you and/or your family.

How long does it take to make a prosthesis?

Usually from initial consultation to delivery of your prosthesis will take between three and six visits to the clinic, each visit can last up to four hours.

How long will my prosthesis last?

The components in your prosthesis have a warranty attached and major components such as knees and feet should last several years. The fit of your socket can change however, especially during the first two years post-amputation and so the socket will need to be adjusted and sometimes replaced as the shape and volume of your residual limb changes. The socket fitting is the most important component of your limb system.

When will I walk again?

This depends on the level of mobility you were achieving immediately pre-operatively. This is discussed on an individual basis.

It is not uncommon however, for some people to achieve a higher level of mobility and comfort than before they had their amputation.

Where is Lewes?

In Sussex, in the South East of England

Can I stay locally in Lewes?

In some circumstances, for those who have traveled some distance, local accommodation can be arranged and an accelerated programme of provision completed.

Can you park at the centre?

There is a number of parking spaces at the centre.

Do you offer advice over the /?

I can offer some advice by and and will try to respond to every inquiry once. I am unable to be involved in lengthy correspondence as this takes me away from my clinical practice. I will endeavour to provide a satisfactory response to any question. There is no such thing as a stupid question, only stupid answers.

Can I see you under NHS funding?

There is currently no formal agreement allowing me to see clients under NHS funding, however there are precedents for referral to private providers.

If you are sure that your local service centre has done all they can to support you and you feel I can help further, you will need to discuss with your rehabilitation consultant at your next appointment.

Do you offer walking training?

Walking training can be provided at the centre or in your home by our appointed physiotherapist who specialises in amputee rehabilitation. This module can be added to your plan.

Do you treat children?

Yes, I have extensive experience in paediatric prosthetics for both congenital absence and anomaly and acquired amputation. DBS checks are complete.

Is there a counsellor I can speak to?

Should you wish to speak to a professional counsellor about issues that are outside the remit of my experience, I can recommend the best to you. This would be a separate referral to my colleague.

Can you visit me in my home?

In rare cases, I can visit you in your home. I understand that for some, mobility and even fear of venturing out can prove restrictive, resulting in a reluctance to visit the centre. 

There would be a premium attached to a home visit and signed consent will be required to enter your home. I can share our lone-working policy which explains all you need to know.

I or a member of my family is facing amputation; What will happen next?

Are you interested in learning more about types of prosthetic foot? Contact us today to secure an expert consultation!

So, you have been told that amputation is the only way forward? Don't panic! 

In the first instance, you will probably be referred to your local NHS centre where you will meet your consultant in rehabilitation medicine and also your prosthetist, physiotherapist, nurse and other members of the multidisciplinary team. This visit should answer most of your fears and set a good foundation for your recovery.

I am an established amputee, why would I choose to come to Design Prosthetics Ltd?

If you are perfectly happy with the service you currently receive, there is no need. 

If however you feel that you aren't achieving your expectations and you feel that the time and attention a very experienced prosthetist can give you, may help you achieve a higher degree of comfort and function, call now.

What do I do now?

Call me 605 081 for a friendly informal discussion around your needs.

We want to establish a lifelong relationship with our clients and we will do all we can to make sure that you are satisfied with your outcome.

If clients are travelling from abroad or from a distance in the UK, we will be happy to give some idea of costings over the or by .

Additional information:

Chris accepts referrals from registered health professionals, case managers, solicitors and NHS offices. In addition, as a registered Prosthetist, Chris is certified to refer, assess and treat any personal enquiry.

Design Prosthetics Ltd is registered to supply prosthetic devices with MHRA, company number:

To be eligible for NHS funding to attend our centre; you would need to discuss your individual case in the first instance with your Rehabilitation Consultant, GP or directly with NHSEngland.

We do not charge VAT if you are registered disabled in the UK.

Prosthetic limb technology has advanced by leaps and bounds, giving amputees a range of bionic options, including artificial knees controlled by microchips, sensor-laden feet driven by artificial intelligence, and robotic hands that a user can manipulate with her mind. But such high-tech designs can cost tens of thousands of dollars, making them unattainable for many amputees, particularly in developing countries.

Now MIT engineers have developed a simple, low-cost, passive prosthetic foot that they can tailor to an individual. Given a user&#;s body weight and size, the researchers can tune the shape and stiffness of the prosthetic foot, such that the user&#;s walk is similar to an able-bodied gait. They estimate that the foot, if manufactured on a wide scale, could cost an order of magnitude less than existing products.

The custom-designed prostheses are based on a design framework developed by the researchers, which provides a quantitative way to predict a user&#;s biomechanical performance, or walking behavior, based on the mechanical design of the prosthetic foot.

&#;[Walking] is something so core to us as humans, and for this segment of the population who have a lower-limb amputation, there&#;s just no theory for us to say, &#;here&#;s exactly how we should design the stiffness and geometry of a foot for you, in order for you to walk as you desire,&#;&#; says Amos Winter, associate professor of mechanical engineering at MIT. &#;Now we can do that. And that&#;s super powerful.&#;

Winter and former graduate student Kathryn Olesnavage report details of this framework in IEEE&#;s Transactions on Neural Systems and Rehabilitation. They have published their results on their new prosthetic foot in the ASME Journal of Mechanical Design, with graduate student Victor Prost and research engineer William Brett Johnson.

Following the gait

In , soon after Winter joined the MIT faculty, he was approached by Jaipur Foot, a manufacturer of artificial limbs based in Jaipur, India. The organization manufactures a passive prosthetic foot, geared toward amputees in developing countries, and donates more than 28,000 models each year to users in India and elsewhere.

&#;They&#;ve been making this foot for over 40 years, and it&#;s rugged, so farmers can use it barefoot outdoors, and it&#;s relatively life-like, so if people go in a mosque and want to pray barefoot, they&#;re likely to not be stigmatized,&#; Winter says. &#;But it&#;s quite heavy, and the internal structure is made all by hand, which creates a big variation in product quality.&#;

The organization asked Winter whether he could design a better, lighter foot that could be mass-produced at low cost.

&#;At that point, we started asking ourselves, &#;how should we design this foot as engineers? How should we predict the performance, given the foot&#;s stiffness and mechanical design and geometry? How should we tune all that to get a person to walk the way we want them to walk?&#;&#; Winter recalls.

The team, led by Olesnavage, first looked for a way to quantitatively relate a prosthesis&#; mechanical characteristics to a user&#;s walking performance &#; a fundamental relationship that had never before been fully codified.

While many developers of prosthetic feet have focused on replicating the movements of able-bodied feet and ankles, Winter&#;s team took a different approach, based on their realization that amputees who have lost a limb below the knee can&#;t feel what a prosthetic foot does.

&#;One of the critical insights we had was that, to a user, the foot is just kind of like a black box &#; it&#;s not connected to their nervous system, and they&#;re not interacting with the foot intimately,&#; Winter says.

Instead of designing a prosthetic foot to replicate the motions of an able-bodied foot, he and Olesnavage looked to design a prosthetic foot that would produce lower-leg motions similar to those of an able-bodied person&#;s lower leg as they walk.

&#;This really opened up the design space for us,&#; Winter says. &#;We can potentially drastically change the foot, so long as we make the the lower leg do what we want it to do, in terms of kinematics and loading, because that&#;s what a user perceives.&#;

With the lower leg in mind, the team looked for ways to relate how the mechanics of the foot relate to how the lower leg moves while the foot is in contact with the ground. To do this, the researchers consulted an existing dataset comprising measurements of steps taken by an able-bodied walker with a given body size and weight. With each step, previous researchers had recorded the ground reaction forces and the changing center of pressure experienced by a walker&#;s foot as it rocked from heel to toe, along with the position and trajectory of the lower leg.

Winter and his colleagues developed a mathematical model of a simple, passive prosthetic foot, which describes the stiffness, possible motion, and shape of the foot. They plugged into the model the ground reaction forces from the dataset, which they could sum up to predict how a user&#;s lower leg would translate through a single step.

With their model, they then tuned the stiffness and geometry of the simulated prosthetic foot to produce a lower-leg trajectory that was close to the able-bodied swing &#; a measure they consider to be a minimal &#;lower leg trajectory error.&#;

&#;Ideally, we would tune the stiffness and geometry of the foot perfectly so we exactly replicate the motion of the lower leg,&#; Winter says. &#;Overall, we saw that we can get pretty darn close to able-bodied motion and loading, with a passive structure.&#;

Evolving on a curve

The team then sought to identify an ideal shape for a single-part prosthetic foot that would be simple and affordable to manufacture, while still producing a leg trajectory very similar to that of able-bodied walkers.

To pinpoint an ideal foot shape, the group ran a &#;genetic algorithm&#; &#; a common technique used to weed out unfavorable options, in search of the most optimal designs.

&#;Just like a population of animals, we made a population of feet, all with different variables to make different curve shapes,&#; Winter says. &#;We loaded them into simulation and calculated their lower leg trajectory error. The ones that had a high error, we killed off.&#;

Those that had a lower error, the researchers further mixed and matched with other shapes, to evolve the population toward an ideal shape, with the lowest possible lower leg trajectory error. The team used a wide Bezier curve to describe the shape of the foot using only a few select variables, which were easy to vary in the genetic algorithm. The resulting foot shape looked similar to the side-view of a toboggan.

Olesnavage and Winter figured that, by tuning the stiffness and shape of this Bezier curve to a person&#;s body weight and size, the team should be able to produce a prosthetic foot that generates leg motions similar to able-bodied walking. To test this idea, the researchers produced several feet for volunteers in India. The prostheses were made from machined nylon, a material chosen for its energy-storage capability. 

&#;What&#;s cool is, this behaves nothing like an able-bodied foot &#; there&#;s no ankle or metatarsal joint &#; it&#;s just one big structure, and all we care about is how the lower leg is moving through space,&#; Winter says. &#;Most of the testing was done indoors, but one guy ran outside, he liked it so much. It puts a spring in your step.&#;

Going forward, the team has partnered with Vibram, an Italian company that manufactures rubber outsoles &#; flexible hiking boots and running shoes that look like feet. The company is designing a life-like covering for the team&#;s prosthesis, that will also give the foot some traction over muddy or slippery surfaces. The researchers plan to test the prosthetics and coverings on volunteers in India this spring.

Winter says the simple prosthetic foot design can also be a much more affordable and durable option for populations such as soldiers who want to return to active duty or veterans who want to live an active lifestyle.

&#;A common passive foot in the U.S. market will cost $1,000 to $10,000, made out of carbon fiber. Imagine you go to your prosthetist, they take a few measurements, they send them back to us, and we send back to you a custom-designed nylon foot for a few hundred bucks. This model is potentially game-changing for the industry, because we can fully quantify the foot and tune it for individuals, and use cheaper materials.&#;

This research was funded, in part, by the MIT Tata Center for Technology and Design.

Contact us to discuss your requirements of categories of prosthetic feet. Our experienced sales team can help you identify the options that best suit your needs.