Special equipment and aids for the young bilateral upper-extremity amputee.

Considerable information is available concerning the treatment philosophy, prosthetic prescription, and training of the child with a unilateral upper-limb deficiency (5). However, there are few published data on adapted equipment for the child with a bilateral upper-extremity deficit. To help remedy this lack, this article presents a brief discussion of the current treatment philosophy at the Institute of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation in the New York University Medical Center and describes some of the adapted equipment and training procedures that have been found useful for children with congenital bilateral upper-limb deficiencies. The presentation is essentially confined to children fitted with conventional prostheses. Experience with unilateral and a few bilateral amelic children at the Institute of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation has led to the conclusion that these patients obtain inadequate benefit from conventional fitting and might do better with externally powered prostheses. However, these prostheses pose their own unique training problems which are not considered here.