Tackle Design Inc.

With clients ranging from major research universities to artists, from industrialists to inventors, Tackle Design Inc is unified by the pursuit of elegant solutions and a commitment to quality workmanship.

Our areas of accomplishment range from solutions for improving cardiovascular surgery to refinement of aerospace manufacturing processes to concept development and prototyping for consumer electronics devices.

 

Tools for Minimally Invasive Robotic Surgery (MIRS)

Robotic systems have become the state of the art in many types of surgical procedures, allowing the surgeon to perform complex operations through small, fast healing incisions. Tackle is a member of an interdisciplinary team of NIH funded researchers at NCSU developing retraction and fixation tools for MIRS procedures. Our involvement has included creativity training for team members, concept development and prototyping work as well as participation in surgical trials.

The Open Prosthetics Project

Tackle has launched The Open Prosthetics Project to create useful and innovative prosthetic devices and fully publish our designs for anyone to use, customize, or improve on. By substituting public good for profits, we believe that we can generate far more societal benefit than if we commercialized and sold our ideas. We are currently developing several novel prosthetic concepts and seeking funding from donations and grants.

Jonathan Kuniholm

Jonathan Kuniholm, an Iraq veteran who lost his arm in 2005, is one of 300 engineers working on DARPA’s Revolutionizing Prosthetics 2009 program, which was created to solve the thorny interdisciplinary problems that stand in the way of creating truly functional prosthetic arms.

An international team led by The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Md., has developed a prototype of the first fully integrated prosthetic arm that can be controlled naturally, provide sensory feedback and allows for eight degrees of freedom—a level of control far beyond the current state of the art for prosthetic limbs. Proto 1, developed for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Revolutionizing Prosthetics Program, is a complete limb system that also includes a virtual environment used for patient training, clinical configuration, and to record limb movements and control signals during clinical investigations.

Jesse Sullivan, a former high-power lineman, lost both arms in 2001 after being electrocuted on the job. In these three photos, he demonstrates the capabilities of the Proto 1 prosthetic arm system during clinical tests at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago.