The steps George Washington University biomedical engineering alumna Sarah Malinowski, M.S. '23, took to walk across the Polish border and into Ukraine were second nature.
They’d be anything but routine, though, for the people she was going to see. Changing that was precisely why she was there.
In June, Malinowski brought her prosthetic knee prototype—called Rugged Redemption—to hospitals in Ukraine, where Russian invasion has devastated the country with war for the past two years. There, she’d meet with amputees who had lost their legs as a result the war and just wanted to feel some sense of normalcy—the way it was before that fateful night in February 2022 that marked the start of the invasion.
Returning to normal is also the entire basis of the prototype Malinowski has spent years meticulously developing for active transfemoral amputees, especially veterans, to regain their lifestyle without having to manually change or adjust their artificial knee so the activities they’ve done all their lives can once again become habitual.
To truly get a sense of Rugged Redemption’s need, Malinowski decided to venture to the part of the world where “normal” has been so intensely interrupted.
Read the full article on GW Today.