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Celebrating Lives, Improving Care.
April is Limb Loss and Limb Difference Awareness Month — a time to celebrate the 2.1 million Americans living with limb loss. Their resilience deserves our recognition. But even more, it deserves innovation.
Because this month isn’t just about awareness. It’s about action.
It’s about making sure that the tools we use to support those with limb loss are as advanced, adaptive, and real-world as the people who rely on them. And that starts with understanding how they move.
The Real Challenge Isn’t Just Fitting — It’s Function
Getting a prosthesis that fits is step one. But wearing it comfortably? Using it confidently? That’s where the real journey begins.
Long-term wearability, performance, and confidence rely not just on how a prosthesis feels in a clinic — but how it functions in everyday life. Unfortunately, traditional assessments often depend on limited in-clinic gait observation or inconsistent patient self-reporting.
And the truth is, what we see in clinic isn’t always what happens in every day life. Plus, sometimes we just can’t see minor deviations with the naked eye – a major limitation when even slight adjustments make a world of a difference in optimizing fit and function.
That’s why precision is everything.
Every Step Tells the Truth
Objective gait analysis provides a window into real-world prosthetic performance, offering critical insights that go beyond observational, in-clinic analysis. By capturing everyday movement patterns, clinicians gain actionable, objective data that can guide better prosthetic fitting, adjustment, and long-term care decisions.
OneStep makes it possible to access this information accurately and easily, without the need for wearables, gait labs, or cumbersome equipment. Using just a smartphone, OneStep empowers clinicians and patients alike to understand mobility immediately, wherever they are.
Why does gait matter?
Key temporal and spatial gait parameters directly impact prosthetic fitting and long-term outcomes:
Moreover, gait speed itself is a crucial marker. Research by Batten et al. (2018) shows that gait speed is not just a metric—it's a vital sign, revealing a patient's potential for successful prosthetic use and guiding clinical decisions on device selection, k levels, and rehabilitation planning. Capturing gait during daily activities—as emphasized by De Marchis et al. (2022)—uncovers subtle movement patterns that are easily missed in clinical settings.
By grounding prosthetic care in measurable, everyday motion, objective gait analysis helps clinicians fine-tune devices, predict outcomes, and proactively prevent complications—transforming mobility, one step at a time.
Fit, Wear, and the Missing Feedback Loop
Here’s a common story: a patient starts favoring one side, experiences socket discomfort, or feels less stable. But because there’s no real-time data, these issues go unflagged — sometimes for months. The patient may become less compliant with wearing their device or participating in their rehab program. A functional mobility decline begins, slowly at first, but then begins to significantly limit their independence and quality of life.
OneStep changes that.
By closing the feedback loop with continuous, objective gait data, prosthetists can identify changes in fit and wear over time and reach out to the patient quickly — getting them back in for an adjustment sooner.
The result? Better care. Better comfort. Better outcomes.
Why This Matters More Than Ever
Prosthetic care demands more than guesswork — it demands precision, personalization, and proof.
With OneStep, clinicians can:
- Precisely adjust devices based on real-world mobility insights, not subjective feedback alone.
- Justify the need for advanced prosthetic solutions with objective documentation.
- Predict patient outcomes and risk status using clinically validated gait parameters.
In a world moving toward telehealth, hybrid care, and value-based models, real-world gait insights aren’t just helpful — they’re essential.
OneStep eliminates barriers to standardizing gait analysis in the orthotic and prosthetic space: no wearables, no specialized labs, just a smartphone capturing the full story behind every step.
Spread Awareness by Advancing
This Limb Loss Awareness Month, let’s move beyond recognition — and into revolution.
Experience how OneStep helps you hear what every step is saying.
Schedule a call to get started today.
Because when you can measure movement precisely, you can change lives profoundly.
