Smoltek—from carbon nanofibers to mind-controlled robotic prostheses

Finn Gram­naes was in the oper­at­ing room when his daugh­ter was deliv­ered by planned cesare­an sec­tion. But instead of hear­ing the new­born announce its arrival into the world with a scream, he heard noth­ing. “There was a strange silence in the room,” Finn Gram­naes remem­bers. “It made me ter­ri­fied, and I froze.”

After what seemed like an eter­ni­ty, the girl began to scream. But still, some­thing wasn’t right. “I felt there was some­thing in the room that…,” says Finn Gram­naes with­out fin­ish­ing the sentence.

Even­tu­al­ly, he got to see his long-await­ed baby girl. He was filled with relief and love at the sight of her. She was won­der­ful. But he also real­ized that life had tak­en an unex­pect­ed turn. She had a severe­ly deformed right leg. The knee joint was miss­ing as well as the tib­ia, and the foot was twisted.

Life-changing decision

After more than six years of well-meant but unsuc­cess­ful attempts to recon­struct the knee joint and tib­ia, the girl’s par­ents faced a life-chang­ing deci­sion. Sac­ri­fice their daughter’s child­hood for more lengthy and painful attempts at recon­struc­tion. Or per­suade her to cut off the leg above the non-exis­tent knee joint.

After much delib­er­a­tion, they per­suad­ed the girl to ampu­tate. “But it did not go as expect­ed,” says her father. When he con­vinced his daugh­ter to ampu­tate, he didn’t know there were no knee joint pros­the­ses for chil­dren. “Instead, they hand­made some­thing, with basi­cal­ly a hinge,” he explains.

Took matters into his own hands

The girl stum­bled and fell fre­quent­ly and often came home with abra­sions all over her body. “She was scared and inse­cure. It was men­tal­ly bad for her,” says her father. He expe­ri­enced ter­ri­ble remorse for “trick­ing” his daugh­ter into some­thing that didn’t work out. “We can fly to the moon, but we can’t make knee replace­ments for chil­dren,” he says.

Finn Gram­naes took mat­ters into his own hands. In the evenings, until late at night, and every week­end, he stud­ied anato­my and exper­i­ment­ed with designs that mim­ic a knee joint’s move­ments and force dis­tri­b­u­tion. His efforts paid off, and he could give his daugh­ter bet­ter and bet­ter prostheses.

Arti­fi­cial knee joint

Finn Gram­naes con­tin­ued to devel­op his pros­the­sis. In April 1990, he applied for patents for his “arti­fi­cial knee joint” and an “arti­fi­cial foot.”

For more peo­ple to ben­e­fit from his pros­the­ses, he looked for busi­ness part­ners with good access to cap­i­tal and a large mar­ket. He found them in the Unit­ed States. Togeth­er they found­ed Cen­tu­ry XXII Inno­va­tions Inc. in Michi­gan, where many advanced con­tract man­u­fac­tur­ers serve the avi­a­tion indus­try. Finn Gram­naes became respon­si­ble for the devel­op­ment and indus­tri­al­iza­tion of his knee and foot prostheses.

To Sweden from Bangladesh

Mean­while, in Bangladesh, Moham­mad Shafiqul Kabir was study­ing sci­ence. Shafiqul—called Shafiq by friends—nurtured a desire to study abroad.

When his stud­ies at the uni­ver­si­ty were com­ing to an end, he tried to fig­ure out  what to do next. He con­tact­ed the Swedish Embassy to find out which master’s pro­grams might be of inter­est. “Swedish uni­ver­si­ties must have good pro­grams, and after­all, the Nobel prize was estab­lished in Swe­den,” Shafiq Kabir remembers.

A master’s pro­gram at the Chalmers Uni­ver­si­ty of Tech­nol­o­gy in Gothen­burg caught his inter­est. It focused on nan­otech­nol­o­gy. “I remem­ber think­ing: ‘There it is! I’ll give it a shot’,” says Shafiq Kabir and explains: “Nan­otech­nol­o­gy was new and very hyped at the time.”

Shafiq Kabir arrived in Swe­den on a sun­ny day in August 1998. Two years lat­er, in 2000, he grad­u­at­ed with a Mas­ter of Sci­ence degree.

Short­ly after that, Shafiq Kabir was offered doc­tor­al stu­dent employ­ment at the Depart­ment of Microtech­nol­o­gy and Nanoscience at the Chalmers Uni­ver­si­ty of Tech­nol­o­gy. He was delight­ed. Since child­hood, he had dreamed of doing research.

Shafiq Kabir began this new chap­ter in his life in the area of mol­e­c­u­lar elec­tron­ics but even­tu­al­ly moved to research on car­bon nanos­truc­tures. In par­tic­u­lar, he stud­ied how car­bon nanos­truc­tures can be made com­pat­i­ble with the man­u­fac­tur­ing process of semi­con­duc­tors. His super­vi­sor, Pro­fes­sor Peter Enoks­son, was pio­neer­ing and lead­ing in that area.

Nanostructures on semiconductors

Shafiq Kabir’s research at the Chalmers Uni­ver­si­ty of Tech­nol­o­gy was about using car­bon atoms to cre­ate small struc­tures direct­ly on CMOS semi­con­duc­tors. He had to tack­le many challenges.

One chal­lenge is that the struc­tures we are talk­ing about are extreme­ly small. They are mea­sured in nanome­tres (nm). That’s why they are called nanos­truc­tures. It is dif­fi­cult to under­stand how small they are. But imag­ine tak­ing one of your hairs and split­ting it length­wise, and then divid­ing each half again and so on until you have about 50,000 strips of your sin­gle hair strand. Each such strip is now about one nanome­tre in diam­e­ter. How can struc­tures that are so incred­i­bly small be built with pre­ci­sion? That was one of the ques­tions Shafiq Kabir searched for an answer to.

Anoth­er chal­lenge is that CMOS semi­con­duc­tors break down at the tem­per­a­tures need­ed to fab­ri­cate nanos­truc­tures. To make it pos­si­ble to fab­ri­cate nanos­truc­tures direct­ly on CMOS semi­con­duc­tors, the fab­ri­ca­tion tem­per­a­ture must be low­ered by sev­er­al hun­dred degrees. But how? That was anoth­er of Shafiq Kabir’s research questions.

Versatile carbon nanostructures

One form of a nanos­truc­ture, in par­tic­u­lar, attract­ed the inter­est of Shafiq Kabir: car­bon nanofibers (CNFs). They have many unique mate­r­i­al prop­er­ties that are inter­est­ing in all sorts of contexts.

Car­bon nanofibers are sur­pris­ing­ly durable and can be used as a sup­port or rein­force­ment bar (“rebar”) for mate­ri­als that become brit­tle at small sizes. They can also be used as minia­ture spac­ers between lay­ers of mate­ri­als. Or as nee­dles that make micro­scop­ic holes in membranes.

Car­bon nanofibers are very good at con­duct­ing heat—but only in one direc­tion. That prop­er­ty can be used to solve one of the biggest prob­lems as more and more tran­sis­tors are squeezed onto a chip: Heat dis­si­pa­tion. A chip can become mad­ly hot, short­en­ing its lifes­pan and increas­ing the risk of fail­ure. But car­bon nanofibers from the chip to the cap­sule that enclos­es the chip can effec­tive­ly dis­si­pate the heat.

And it’s not just heat that car­bon nanofibers con­duct effi­cient­ly, but also elec­tric­i­ty. That’s why they can be used as con­tacts and con­duc­tors on chips instead of sol­der­ing cop­per con­tacts and con­duc­tors. The good con­duc­tiv­i­ty, com­bined with their small size, also opens up the pos­si­bil­i­ty of con­nect­ing biosen­sors direct­ly to indi­vid­ual nerve cells.

Large surface area with small fiber

But above all, car­bon nanofibers arranged in rows and columns can be used to mul­ti­ply a sur­face area. Each car­bon nanofi­bre increas­es the sur­face area by ? times its diam­e­ter times its height. So a “for­est” of car­bon nanofibers will grow the sur­face area thou­sands of times.

Imag­ine a square sur­face with a width and height of one mil­lime­ter. It can eas­i­ly hold 100,000 rows and as many columns of car­bon nanofibers that are 5 nanome­tres in diam­e­ter and 50 microm­e­ters in length. The sur­face area of those car­bon nanofibers increas­es the total sur­face area 7 855 times. In oth­er words, with car­bon nanofibers, you can eas­i­ly shrink an area of 88 × 88 mil­lime­ters to just 1 × 1 millimeters.

This abil­i­ty to increase the sur­face area many thou­sand­folds is ben­e­fi­cial in var­i­ous appli­ca­tions. For exam­ple, with car­bon nanofibers coat­ed with tita­ni­um on the sur­face of a tita­ni­um implant, the implant’s sur­face area increas­es, mak­ing it eas­i­er to grow togeth­er with bone. Anoth­er exam­ple is the minia­tur­iza­tion of capacitors.

Car­bon nanofi­bre capacitors

A capac­i­tor is an elec­tron­ic com­po­nent that tem­porar­i­ly stores ener­gy in the form of an elec­tric field between two sep­a­rat­ed con­duc­tive sur­faces. A “for­est” of car­bon nanofibers pro­vides a lot of sur­face areas between which ener­gy can be stored in a tiny space. There­fore, capac­i­tors with car­bon nanofibers can be made much small­er with­out degrad­ing their abil­i­ty to store ener­gy (capac­i­tance).

This is espe­cial­ly use­ful in chip appli­ca­tions, where capac­i­tors are need­ed very close to—or prefer­ably on—the chip to damp­en the noise that results when thou­sands of tran­sis­tors rapid­ly turn the pow­er on and off to make ones and zeros. The damp­en­ing effect comes from the fact that it takes a lit­tle while to charge and dis­charge a capacitor.

The birth of Smoltek

How­ev­er, all these excit­ing appli­ca­tions of car­bon nanofibers require the abil­i­ty to man­u­fac­ture them to a spe­cif­ic diam­e­ter and length, place them with extreme pre­ci­sion, and do so at a tem­per­a­ture that does not dam­age the sub­strate. How to achieve this was the focus of Shafiq Kabir’s research.

His research efforts bore fruit, and in 2005, while fin­ish­ing his Ph.D. the­sis, he start­ed Smoltek to devel­op the meth­ods fur­ther to make them avail­able to the indus­try. He was accom­pa­nied by his Ph.D. advi­sor, Pro­fes­sor Peter Enoksson.

Professor meets his adept

When Peter Enoks­son was offered a chair at the Depart­ment of Microtech­nol­o­gy and Nanoscience at the Chalmers Uni­ver­si­ty of Tech­nol­o­gy, he glad­ly accept­ed the pro­fes­sor­ship. He start­ed in Octo­ber 2001.

He came to work close­ly with Ste­fan Bengts­son (now Pres­i­dent and CEO of the Chalmers Uni­ver­si­ty of Tech­nol­o­gy) and Eleanor Camp­bell (who cur­rent­ly holds a Chair of Chem­istry at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Edin­burgh). Their com­mon area of inter­est was car­bon nanos­truc­tures. One of the Ph.D. stu­dents who also worked on this was Shafiq Kabir.

“Shafiq was very much into apply­ing ‘help lay­ers’ to con­trol where car­bon nanos­truc­tures grow and to make them faster and more con­trolled,” Peter Enoks­son remem­bers. Peter Enoks­son became Shafiq Kabir’s supervisor.

“We saw many appli­ca­tions of tech­nol­o­gy and thought it would take over every­thing,” recalls Peter Enoks­son. They called it “the new electronics.”

But they also real­ized that it had to be made com­pat­i­ble with CMOS—the pre­dom­i­nant man­u­fac­tur­ing method for semi­con­duc­tor devices. It had to be pos­si­ble to man­u­fac­ture the car­bon nanos­truc­tures at tem­per­a­tures that CMOS can withstand—which is much low­er than need­ed to cre­ate car­bon nanos­truc­tures. So this became the focus of their fur­ther research.

Huge in few years

When Shafiq Kabir lat­er found­ed Smoltek, Peter Enoks­son, Ste­fan Bengts­son, and Eleanor Camp­bell became the company’s sci­en­tif­ic advi­sors. And when Smoltek raised seed cap­i­tal from Chalmers Inno­va­tion (now Chalmers Ven­ture), a busi­ness incu­ba­tor asso­ci­at­ed with the Chalmers Uni­ver­si­ty of Tech­nol­o­gy, Peter Enoks­son was involved in invest­ing in the company.

“Shafiq and I thought Smoltek would be huge in just a few years,” says Peter Enoks­son with a laugh. Because it turned out not to be as easy as they thought. Despite unprece­dent­ed results and excel­lent prop­er­ties, it was dif­fi­cult to con­vince the elec­tron­ics industry.

After a few years, it was high time to bring indus­try expe­ri­ence to the board of direc­tors. The ques­tion went to Finn Gramnaes—the father who built a knee pros­the­sis to help his daugh­ter and then took it to the world market.

Time for industrial experience

In the same year as Shafiq Kabir began his doc­tor­al stud­ies, the com­pa­ny that Finn Gram­naes co-found­ed in the US was sold to the Ice­landic pros­thet­ics man­u­fac­tur­er Össur. Finn Gramnae’s com­pa­ny had received many takeover offers. Even­tu­al­ly, the bids were so high that some of Finn’s senior part­ners decid­ed it was time to sell.

Finn was now with­out a job but with a good deal of mon­ey in his pock­et. He spent a lot of time in Spain, played golf, went to cock­tail par­ties, and tried to live the life expect­ed of some­one who had made an exit and was finan­cial­ly inde­pen­dent. But some­thing was miss­ing in his life.

Searching for meaning in life

Finn Gram­naes want­ed some­thing tan­gi­ble to do—something that helped oth­ers and gave him mean­ing in life. So he start­ed to help oth­er inno­va­tors and entre­pre­neurs devel­op their businesses.

Finn Gram­naes had some good con­tacts in the finan­cial world. They offered their con­tacts in the hope of shar­ing risk with some­one with mon­ey. In this way, Finn came to sit on the boards of a wide range of businesses.

“I was look­ing for a com­pa­ny that real­ly could con­tribute to human­i­ty,” Finn Gram­naes says. But years passed with­out him find­ing the “right” com­pa­ny. He did, how­ev­er, learn some hard lessons.

But one day, he found on his desk a doc­u­ment that would change everything.

It clicked

“One day, some­one gave me a text by Smoltek,” Finn Gram­naes says. “It ‘clicked’ when I read it, and I thought, ‘Wow! There it is.’”

Smoltek had a pend­ing patent that cov­ered many appli­ca­tion areas. There were many thoughts and visions about what was pos­si­ble to do with it. “I saw the pos­si­bil­i­ties and was extreme­ly fas­ci­nat­ed,” says Finn Gram­naes. “Smoltek’s tech­nol­o­gy has the poten­tial to solve many of the prob­lems I encoun­tered dur­ing my jour­ney devel­op­ing pros­the­ses.” He adds: “If I hadn’t made that jour­ney, which made me real­ize that there is a lack of advanced tech­nol­o­gy in sev­er­al areas, I prob­a­bly wouldn’t have fall­en for Smoltek.”

So when Chalmers Inno­va­tion asked him if he would con­sid­er join­ing Smoltek’s board, he accept­ed with­out hes­i­ta­tion. Even­tu­al­ly, he and Peter Enoks­son bought out Chalmers Inno­va­tion and became the company’s largest shareholders.

Business concept

Smoltek’s busi­ness con­cept is to license the tech­nol­o­gy in var­i­ous degrees of refine­ment. From the most basic lev­el, that can be used in indus­tri­al research projects, to fin­ished appli­ca­tions, such as car­bon nanofi­bre capacitors.

The busi­ness mod­el is to seek part­ner­ships with com­pa­nies and orga­ni­za­tions that want to eval­u­ate or use Smoltek’s technology.

The focus now and in the future will be on cre­at­ing more and deep­er rela­tion­ships with part­ners. And not least broad­en the search for partners.

Working with a conservative industry

Until recent­ly, Smoltek has only focused on the semi­con­duc­tor indus­try, but since the for­ma­tion in autumn 2020 of the sub­sidiary Smoltek Inno­va­tion, the search for part­ners in new sec­tors has gath­ered pace—not least in green ener­gy and green industry.

There are two rea­sons for Smoltek’s broad­en­ing. First, Smoltek’s core tech­nol­o­gy, for which it holds a world patent, is com­pre­hen­sive and can be used in many and diverse indus­tries far beyond the semi­con­duc­tor industry.

The sec­ond rea­son is that the semi­con­duc­tor indus­try is very con­ser­v­a­tive and cau­tious. It is not sur­pris­ing. Com­pa­nies in the indus­try are mak­ing huge invest­ments, count­ed in bil­lions of dol­lars, which increase dra­mat­i­cal­ly with each new gen­er­a­tion of CPUs and oth­er semi­con­duc­tor com­po­nents. There­fore, com­pa­nies are extreme­ly cau­tious about what tech­nol­o­gy they bring in. It has to be estab­lished and already proved itself in the real world.

The last rea­son is also why Smoltek has cho­sen to focus on car­bon nanofi­bre capac­i­tors. It gives Smoltek a chance to show what the tech­nol­o­gy is capa­ble of, in a way vis­i­ble to the semi­con­duc­tor indus­try, but with no risk for them.

Battle-testing the technology

Many chips have attached capac­i­tors that com­pete with con­nec­tors for space. If the capac­i­tors can be made small­er, the chip can be made small­er or have more connectors.

Smoltek’s strat­e­gy is to help the world’s largest capac­i­tor man­u­fac­tur­ers use car­bon nanofibers to pro­duce capac­i­tors that take up less sur­face area and, more impor­tant­ly, less height than the minia­tur­ized capac­i­tors avail­able today.

In this way, Smoltek’s tech­nol­o­gy is bat­tle-test­ed in a way that is “harm­less” to the semi­con­duc­tor indus­try but vis­i­ble to them. In par­al­lel, Smoltek talks with all major com­pa­nies in the semi­con­duc­tor indus­try to con­vince them to dare the leap.

Next step

Once the car­bon nanofi­bre capac­i­tors have proven them­selves as dis­crete com­po­nents, the next step will be to move them into the chip. The final goal is to build them direct­ly on the sil­i­con. Smoltek already has the tech­nol­o­gy for this.

Once on sil­i­con, Smoltek can help the semi­con­duc­tor indus­try with many oth­er things too. For exam­ple, cre­at­ing chips with mul­ti­ple sil­i­con lay­ers where Smoltek’s car­bon nanofibers can act as minia­ture spac­ers, sol­der joint rein­force­ment bars, or elec­tri­cal con­duc­tors. Smoltek’s tech­nol­o­gy can also dis­si­pate the heat gen­er­at­ed inside the chip, there­by mak­ing cool­ing easier.

New opportunities in the green industry and energy sectors

Smoltek has focused on the semi­con­duc­tor indus­try from the very begin­ning. It came nat­u­ral­ly; Shafiq’s research was about cre­at­ing car­bon nanos­truc­tures on CMOS semi­con­duc­tors, and the semi­con­duc­tor indus­try needs new solu­tions to keep dou­bling the num­ber of tran­sis­tors every two years.

But Smoltek’s tech­nol­o­gy has many appli­ca­tions far beyond the semi­con­duc­tor indus­try. There­fore, Smoltek has moved the semi­con­duc­tor endeav­or into its own busi­ness unit, called Smoltek Semi, and added a new busi­ness unit, called Smoltek Inno­va­tion, with the mis­sion to pur­sue oth­er applications.

Just as Smoltek Semi has strate­gi­cal­ly cho­sen to focus on car­bon nanofi­bre capac­i­tors, Smoltek Inno­va­tion has strate­gi­cal­ly placed hydro­gen pro­duc­tion in its focal point. Hydro­gen has emerged as the key to mak­ing heavy indus­try car­bon-free and stor­ing renew­able ener­gy. Two appli­ca­tion areas of imme­di­ate vital importance.

Fossil-free steel

In heavy indus­try, projects are under­way to reduce their use of fos­sil fuels and green­house gas emissions.

In Swe­den, for exam­ple, the min­ing com­pa­ny LKAB, the steel man­u­fac­tur­er SSAB and the ener­gy com­pa­ny Vat­ten­fall are work­ing on a joint project to devel­op fos­sil-free steel. Hydro­gen gas has an essen­tial func­tion in this con­text; the gas replaces coal and coke in steel production.

The tech­nol­o­gy can reduce car­bon diox­ide emis­sions from the Swedish indus­try by a third, and in the future, help reduce emis­sions from iron and steel pro­duc­tion worldwide.

How­ev­er, there is a catch. If the steel is to be fos­sil-free, the hydro­gen must be pro­duced in a renew­able way.

The dilemma of intermittent power supply

Hydro­gen can be pro­duced by run­ning elec­tric­i­ty through water. In this process, water, con­sist­ing of two hydro­gen atoms and one oxy­gen atom, is splin­tered into hydro­gen gas and oxy­gen gas.

But for this hydro­gen pro­duc­tion to be fos­sil-free, the elec­tric­i­ty used must also be fos­sil-free and prefer­ably pro­duced from renew­able sources. Thus, the pro­duc­tion of hydro­gen must use elec­tric­i­ty pro­duced by solar, wind, or water.

Such elec­tric­i­ty is not always in con­stant sup­ply; the sun goes into the clouds, the wind slack­ens, and water reser­voirs dry up. So the process of pro­duc­ing hydro­gen must work in the pres­ence of an inter­mit­tent pow­er supply.

There are two main ways to pro­duce hydro­gen by run­ning elec­tric­i­ty through water.

Electrolysis the old way

The old­est and most con­ven­tion­al way of pro­duc­ing hydro­gen is alka­line elec­trol­y­sis. In this process, lye (potas­si­um hydrox­ide or sodi­um hydrox­ide), which is high­ly cor­ro­sive, is added, and elec­tric­i­ty is applied through two elec­trodes made of a nick­el alloy. These elec­trodes are sep­a­rat­ed by a mem­brane which allows hydrox­ide ions (OH-) to flow through, on their way from one elec­trode to the oth­er, while sep­a­rat­ing the hydro­gen gas pro­duced at one elec­trode from the oxy­gen gas pro­duced at the other.

This tech­nique has sev­er­al dis­ad­van­tages. Main­ly is the low effi­cien­cy. The ener­gy val­ue of the hydro­gen gen­er­at­ed is only 65% of the ener­gy sup­plied. In addi­tion, the method works poor­ly when the avail­abil­i­ty of elec­tric­i­ty varies.

Electrolysis with carbon nanofibers

A bet­ter tech­nique is poly­mer elec­trolyte mem­brane (PEM) elec­trol­y­sis. Its main advan­tages are high effi­cien­cy, cur­rent­ly upwards of 80%, and expect­ed to reach 86% by 2030. In addi­tion, the method works even when the elec­tric­i­ty is fluc­tu­at­ing, mak­ing it suit­able for use with renew­able ener­gy sources such as solar and wind.

But the elec­trodes immersed in water on either side of the mem­brane must be coat­ed with the scarce and pre­cious met­als plat­inum and irid­i­um. For com­par­i­son, gold is 40 times more abun­dant in the Earth’s crust than irid­i­um. The annu­al pro­duc­tion is just three tonnes.

This is where Smoltek’s tech­nol­o­gy comes in.

Smoltek’s tech­nol­o­gy allows par­ti­cles of the rare and pre­cious met­als to be placed at the tip of car­bon nanofibers, which in turn are placed in a way that max­i­mizes expo­sure. In this way, the elec­trodes can be made up to three times more effi­cient while reduc­ing the amount of pre­cious met­al need­ed. This, in turn, can lead to sav­ings of up to 30 per­cent for hydro­gen pro­duc­tion plants.

Energy storage with carbon nanofibers

The same method can be used for ener­gy storage.

A sore point for renew­ables like solar and wind is the dif­fi­cul­ty of stor­ing the ener­gy pro­duced. Solar ener­gy can be stored in bat­ter­ies for short peri­ods, but to save the ener­gy pro­duced dur­ing the many hours of sun­shine in sum­mer for the dark and cold sea­son requires an entire­ly dif­fer­ent stor­age tech­nol­o­gy. This is where hydro­gen comes in.

When renew­able sources pro­duce excess elec­tric­i­ty, the sur­plus is con­vert­ed into hydro­gen stored for lat­er use. The oxy­gen emit­ted as a by-prod­uct is released or used for var­i­ous purposes.

The hydro­gen thus cre­at­ed can then be used in fuel cells. They pro­duce elec­tric­i­ty from hydro­gen, with only water vapor as a by-product.

One father and two godfathers

As active own­ers, Finn Gram­naes and Peter Enkos­son have tak­en on the task of lift­ing their gaze to see the for­est for the trees. And what they are glimps­ing at the end of the for­est is an envi­ron­men­tal­ly friend­ly prod­uct line—made pos­si­ble with Smoltek’s technology.

Robotic prosthetic legs

In the ear­ly 2000s, when Finn Gram­naes was still look­ing for some­thing mean­ing­ful to do, and his daugh­ter Lisa had just grad­u­at­ed with a bachelor’s degree in mechan­ics, the two began devel­op­ing an arti­fi­cial leg. Their ambi­tious goal was to cre­ate a pros­the­sis that even bet­ter mim­ics human move­ment using advanced sen­sor tech­nol­o­gy and elec­tric motor technology.

“We par­tic­i­pat­ed in some uni­ver­si­ty projects and learned bit by bit how to build a robot­ic leg pros­the­sis,” Finn Gram­naes says. They were even­tu­al­ly able to patent an advanced robot­ic pros­thet­ic leg.

But the effort was in vain. The pros­the­sis could not be made; the tech­nol­o­gy wasn’t com­mer­cial­ly avail­able. “We were way ahead of our time,” Finn Gram­naes says, adding, “The bat­tery tech­nol­o­gy was not devel­oped. There were not the kind of motors that were need­ed. Micro­proces­sors need­ed to be small­er and more pow­er­ful. In par­tic­u­lar, sen­sors were need­ed that could detect dif­fer­ent move­ment pat­terns and sur­faces under real-life conditions.”

Around the corner: Biosensors

Short­ly after Finn Gram­naes real­ized that the advanced tech­nol­o­gy he need­ed was not avail­able, some­one gave him the text writ­ten by Smoltek—the one that made him cry out, “Wow! There it is.”

What clicked when he read about their tech­nol­o­gy was the poten­tial to solve many of the prob­lems he and his daugh­ter had iden­ti­fied. One exam­ple is the pos­si­bil­i­ty of devel­op­ing biosen­sors. Car­bon nanofibers are sig­nif­i­cant­ly small­er than cells. There­fore, they can be used to con­nect indi­vid­ual neu­rons to elec­tron­ics elec­tri­cal­ly. Some­thing nec­es­sary to con­trol a robot­ic pros­thet­ic leg with only the mind.

Pre­cise­ly this, cre­at­ing a tiny chip with car­bon fiber sen­sors, sig­nal ampli­fi­ca­tion, and an elec­tri­cal inter­face, is among the things Smoltek Inno­va­tion is look­ing at right now, in 2021. So maybe tomorrow’s par­ents, who in the past had to per­suade their chil­dren to remove a body part, can instead com­fort their child with the fact that there are robot­ic pros­the­ses that, thanks to Smoltek, can be con­trolled with the pow­er of thought.

May the force be with them.