Brainstorms brought to life: creators vie for distinction at annual Inventors Showcase.

• Author: Peterson, Eric

The DaVinci Institute's annual Inventors Showcase featured 39 inventors showcasing all manner of creations, from audio-enabled greeting cards to jewelry to roving robots inspecting the show floor. [paragraph] Highlighting the daylong event in Broomfield on Nov. 13 was keynote speaker Robert Stoll of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Stoll got the crowd fired up when he discussed the prospects of a Mile-High patent office. "We're actually now looking at a nationwide work force," he said. "If a pilot works, there will be several other offices, and one of the places we're interested in is Denver." [paragraph] Before the grand finale -the presentation of the awards to the following winners - DaVinci Institute honcho Thomas Frey summed up his perspective: "People have invested a great deal of their lives and life savings into the amazing creations that are on display here."

INVENTOR OF THE YEAR Jerome Rifkin, Tensegrity Prosthetics

Jerome Rifkin's inspiration for Tensegrity came in 1996 in the form of a collision with an SUV driven by a personal-injury attorney. As Rifkin was on a bike, he sustained serious injuries and used a cane for more than five years.

When it came to rehabilitation, Rifkin's hypermobile spine and duck-footed gait didn't help things. So he relearned how to walk during the rehab process, and learned all about the mechanics of ankle and foot motion. "That's where the inspiration came from," Rifkin said. "I learned what ankles were supposed to be doing."

It took almost a decade for Rifkin to wrangle a settlement out of the attorney. When he finally did in 2002 - after relocating to Boulder in 1999 - it allowed him to scale back his day job in health-care IT to 30 hours a week and dedicate extra time to reinventing the prosthetic foot with Tensegrity. In 2005, Rifkin landed a grant from the National Center for Medical Rehabilitation Research, allowing him to quit his day job and focus on Tensegrity full-time.

Normal ankles move on all three axes, and that mobility allows people to walk on variable terrain. "There are three easy-to-get rotations my foot does that nothing else on the market does," Rifkin said. The status-quo technology for prosthetic feet, which dates from the 1950s, is cheap and simple, but lacks the feel of a real foot because it does not move on all three axes. Prostheses made of carbon fiber followed in the 1980s, but "it's nothing like a human ankle," Rifkin said. "It's kind of like a springboard."

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