The General Session on Day 2 of SolidWorks World 2011 profiled a very interesting new show on Discovery Channel called Bionic Builders. The show centers around Casey Pieretti and Bill Spracher. Pieretti is a stuntman that has been in films like Spider-Man 2, Starship Troopers and Serenity. Before his stunt career started, he lost the lower portion of his leg when he was 19. Since then, he has been looking for ways to allow ambutees to transition from “being disabled to being fully enabled, but different”. Spracher is the engineer that works with Pieretti to turn his ideas into reality. As Pierretti said, “I don’t want to be enabled; I want to be super-enabled.”
Bionic Builders is the culmination Pieretti’s and Spracher’s quest to create those super abilities through design of new prosthetic limbs with awesome abilities. In this show, they allow Pieretti to swim, jump, run better.
I’ll have more information about this topic later on.