A researcher at Eastern Michigan University and a company that makes prosthetic feet are working on a device that measures what happens when amputees use artificial limbs.

Frank Fedel and College Park Industries in Fraser jointly developed a tool called the Intelligent Prosthetic Endoskeletal Component System, or iPecs.

Company executive Mike Leydet said College Park hopes to have iPecs ready to release this fall.

Fedel said when he joined Eastern Michigan University's orthotics and prosthetics master's degree program in 2003, he was surprised by the lack of hard data on how and whether prosthetics worked the way they were supposed to.

"I wanted to see something that said, 'OK, we're making a difference,'" Fedel said in an interview on the school's Web site.

"In the past, when people with an amputation walked around, you'd have a person with experience in gait analysis look at someone with an amputation as they walked around and they'd say, 'OK, you look like you're walking normally,'" he said. "Or, if not, they'd try to adjust the prosthesis. But 'walking normally' is kind of a subjective thing."

Fedel says at first, iPecs will be a research tool.

He said eventually, he'd like to see it become "as commonplace for amputees as heart rate monitors are to cardiac patients or blood sugar monitors are to diabetics," wrote university spokeswoman Pamela Young.

College Park has tested the device at laboratories at Northwestern and Georgia Tech universities. The company got a $165,000 grant from the National Institutes for Health for the first phase of the project.

Photo: Exercise science lecturer Frank Fedel measures the force of a prosthetic foot. He and engineers from College Park Industries in Fraser, Mich., have invented iPecs, a tool to measure and analyze twisting, direction of force and other aspects of walking to help improve how prosthetic limbs fit and work. (AP Photo/Eastern Michigan University)