According to the National Institutes of Health, around six and a half million people in the United States use a cane, walker or crutches to assist with their mobility.
Crutches are awful. Scooters make life a bit simpler.
But, wouldn't it be amazing if you could keep walking without putting pressure on your knee or your injured lower leg?
The iWalk Free is a prosthetic frame that wraps to the upper thigh to enable walking without a crutch or wheels. Your leg moves the same, but the injured part of the leg is protected and bears no weight. The knee isn’t a resting point so it won’t suffer pain from the device.
Listen as Brad Hunter joins Melanie Cole, MS, to share how the iWalk Free can assist your mobility with minimal intrusion to your daily tasks.
Encore Episode: So Long to Crutches & Scooters: A New Way to Get Around
Recover from your lower leg injury without limiting your mobility.
Additional Info
- Segment Number: 1
- Audio File: lifes_too_short/ts60.mp3
- Featured Speaker: Brad Hunter, iWalk Inventor
- Guest Website: iWalk Free
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Guest Bio:
Brad Hunter used his self-taught engineering, design and manufacturing background to make a fortune by selling his high-performance bike parts business to mega-sports brand Easton Sports.
But it was a broken ankle that set the stage for the next chapter of his life.
The story begins with a Canadian farmer who broke his foot leaving him unable to work the crops on crutches. Never was the axiom, "necessity being the mother of invention" been so accurate as to describe what the farmer did next -- he created what looks like a pirate’s peg leg that he attached to just below the knee of his injured limb. Suddenly, he was hands free and able to tend to his farm again.
Sensing he was on to something, he assembled a group of investors with the hope of mass manufacturing the product. However, he lacked the business/design/engineering/manufacturing savvy to take it to the next level so the "biz" languished.
Fast forward a decade and Brad breaks his ankle and was desperate to find an alternative to crutches. His Internet search landed him on the farmer's invention. He flew to Canada to learn more and ended up buying 50% of the company.
Then, he went to work. He applied all he learned from the bike parts biz to his new passion. He spent the next decade redesigning and re-engineering the product and enlisted the Motion Analysis Research Center at Samuel Merritt University in Oakland, Calif. to perfect the product. He secured a Chinese company to manufacture the new and improved product and opened an assembly plant in Garden Grove.
The result is the iWalk 2.0, which has earned national and international awards including the prestigious I-Novo
Award for “best design” in 2016, which was presented recently in Düsseldorf, Germany.
Fans of the iWalk 2.0 include actor Harrison Ford and sports stars like track & field Olympic medalist Ronald Forbes.
- Length (mins): 13:13
- Waiver Received: No
- Internal Notes: no social media
- Host: Melanie Cole, MS
Published in
Life's Too Short
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