Each year, more than half a million Americans experience limb loss or are born with limb difference, yet only a small fraction receives truly personalized prosthetic care. For many, choosing the right prosthetic foot relies less on data and more on trial and error or clinician’s intuition. Josh Caputo (B.S. MechE /ECE ’10, Ph.D. MechE ’15) encountered this challenge firsthand while pursuing his Ph.D. at Carnegie Mellon University and made it his mission to change the process. The result is Humotech, a company leveraging cutting-edge robotic emulation systems to empower patients and researchers to personalize prosthetic and exoskeleton design like never before.
While Caputo (B.S. MechE /ECE ’10, Ph.D. MechE ’15) didn’t set out to start his own company, he was drawn to engineering because of his interest in cars, bikes, and “anything with a motor.” As a new student, a tour of CMU’s labs solidified that the mechanical engineering department would be his home, particularly with a focus on robotics. It was from internships at NASA and a defense contractor that Caputo began to feel the itch of entrepreneurship. “I realized I wasn’t meant to be a small cog in a big machine,” he said. “And I wanted to build something that mattered, something human-centered.”
