How Noah Elliott and ottobock Are Pushing the limits of prosthetics

Earlier this year, I had the opportunity to sit down virtually with yet one more Paralympic athlete in Noah Elliott. A snowboarder with a limb difference, he won a gold medal for the United States team at the 2018 Winter Games in Pyeongchang, South Korea. A veteran of three Paralympic Games, Elliott has garnered four medals: two gold, one silver, and one bronze. He had his leg amputated above the knee at 15 after being diagnosed with osteosarcoma.

Elliott works closely with Texas-based medical technology company Ottobock as a brand evangelist of sorts. On its website, the company, founded in 1919 in Germany, describes itself as “specializing in prosthetics, orthotics, and mobility solutions,” adding their North Star is “improving quality of life through technological innovation, advanced biomechanics, and advancements in neuromobility.”

“I couldn’t be more proud to be affiliated with them,” Elliott said of his work with Ottobock.

Jan-Philip Rahmann, Ottobock North America’s executive director of marketing and digital sales, explained to me in an interview concurrent to Elliott’s that the company has undergone a “massive transformation” from a B2B company, or business-to-business, to working directly with customers like Elliott who have limb differences. The overarching goal is to help amputees like Elliott lead “healthy and active lives” as well as be there for users and reassure them Ottobock is there to provide unwavering support in their endeavors. Ottobock, Rahmann said, wants to be a “direct line of feedback” for people like Elliott to lean on, as evidenced by its 470 clinics operating worldwide. Rahmann characterized Ottobock’s transformation as big and exciting, also telling me he’s personally “very honored” to be part of it.

In late July, Ottobock announced the release of the #DearAI Community Library. The library, available on Hugging Face, was touted in the press release as “one of the first-of-its-kind open-source datasets of images depicting people with limb loss in everyday life created, selected, and annotated by the community itself, powered by Microsoft.” Ottobock went on to say the imagery “represents a significant step forward in addressing one of AI’s most persistent blind spots: the near-total absence of people with disabilities, and people with limb loss and limb difference in particular, from AI-generated imagery. AI systems will now have accurate representation of how amputees or people with limb differences live their lives.” It matters because disability representation in AI is lacking in many ways, notably in authenticity.

“AI can only imagine what it has already seen—and it has never truly seen the real lives of people with limb loss or limb differences. With the #DearAI Community Library, we are changing that," Martin Böhm, Ottobock’s chief experience officer, said in a statement included with the company’s announcement on July 22. “This initiative is about contribution: giving AI something real to learn from, built by the people whose lives it has never accurately reflected. The community shaped every decision, and that is what makes this library different.”

Technologically speaking, Ottobock currently runs two major research and development labs: one in Europe and one in Salt Lake City that focus on “various upper limb and lower limb prosthetics technology,” according to Rahmann. One of the big “paradigm shifts,” he added, is what’s called a microprocessor knee and is the type of prosthetic Elliott himself wears on a daily basis. Armed with feedback from wearers like Elliott who are “pushing the limits of our devices,” Rahmann said it’s Ottobock’s mission to take that data and “gather and learn for that” and innovate further.

“Ottobock has created top-of-the-line processes as a consumer and, as a user of these devices, everything they’re doing is really top of the line,” Elliott said. “I think it’s super impactful. It’s revolutionizing the way our prosthetics are developing over the near future, and what they’ve already come to do. It’s really incredible.”

When asked how Ottobock’s technology impacts his athletics and everyday life, Elliott said the first and foremost thing his prosthetic does is “give me my humanity back.” It gives him a literal piece of himself back, which he feels is surreal because he never thought it was possible. It makes Elliott feel “more humane” that he can do things like any parent, such as take his daughter to play at the park. The prosthetic makes him feel like he’s not being judged by non-disabled folks, also telling me Ottobock’s devices “actually gives people resilience and power… it gives them opportunity to do whatever they want to do and chase their dreams in their life… as a user, I can’t emphasize that enough.”

For his part, Rahmann concurred.

“People who have limb differences, their whole body begins to compensate and [it] throws everything out of whack. It leads to hip misalignment, which can lead to back pain, which can lead to shoulder pain. It’s this chain reaction of how the body is connected and interconnected,” he said. “Giving someone that kind of stability to be able to use both lower limbs equally gives them back the major control of their upper body as well. That’s what I’m seeing in terms of innovation—the big change that we [at Ottobock] will probably see in microprocessor needs is just going to be the more features coming onto it: water resistance, we have a knee that is completely water and corrosion resistant [to] go swimming in saltwater, for instance. Anything that will push an end user, which is where we get our feedback from, to live more fulfilled lives and to push the limits of where they want to take their devices.”

In a nutshell, Elliott called wearing Ottobock’s device “empowering and freeing.”

He expounded: “I think it’s important to also say every century has its revolution, and we’re living in the day and age where the revolution in 2026 is the future of inclusivity. We’re seeing the growth of people with disabilities, not only being able to move throughout their daily lives, but also we’re seeing adaptive sports taking a new plane and almost beating sometimes. You can beat able-bodied athletes at times with some of the technology we’re seeing, and just showcasing the ability level of people in adaptive sports, the future of it, and that’s why this AI campaign is so powerful. The generations before me never had that chance, or that person to look to, or that device that was going to unlock the rest of their lives and freedom for them. We’re seeing that happen before our very eyes in this day and age, and I think this Dear AI campaign is such a big critical piece of moving forward and helping to inspire the kid who right now is 8 years old… he might get a cancer diagnosis when he’s 16, or the 30-year-old woman who gets into a car accident. Disability can happen at any point to anyone… [this technology] goes such a long way so that when it happens—because it’s not about if, it’s about when—every person throughout their life is either going to know somebody personally or their family or friend has a disability or disease or something. Sometimes they end up being that person [who becomes disabled] and being able to help change the future, and that’s why this campaign is so powerful.”

Feedback on Ottobock’s work, Rahmann told me, is always replete with “resounding gratefulness” from customers which “underlines” the company’s 100-year-old purpose of empowering and enriching the lives of amputees everywhere. Every email is read. Every letter is passed on within the company. And ambassadors like Elliott, Rahmann said, are integral parts of how Ottobock keeps its ear to the proverbial ground and improves its products. There even are Ottobock employees who give real-world feedback internally on the development work going on.

“The biggest thing I can say is, honestly, the writing is on the wall when you look at this [technology],” Elliott said. There’ve been so many technological advances with the products that have come out… we’ve seen the change in the [limb different] community between the microprocessor knee, which, crazy enough, came out the year I was born in 1997 and now we’ve seen it change so much since then. Before that, everything was so mechanical and way different than what we have today, and because of that, we’re seeing people able to do things that we’ve never seen a person with a disability be able to perform. It’s giving access to people. A great example is a mom who has one foot and hasn’t ever been able to go to school and pick up her daughter without being questioned by the kids, or pointed at walking through the grocery store. [The tech] gives gait back to walk in there confidently [and] happily and ask their child about their day at school, or going to the grocery store and coming home feeling confident. I can’t say it enough—the writing’s on the wall: we’re seeing the change [spurred by the protheses] and the mobility and life it gives to people.”

Looking towards the future of orthotics and prosthetics, Elliott said he really wants “a jetpack or something.” In all seriousness, though, he emphasized he’s wholly invested in his evangelism of Ottobock and prosthetics in general, and ardently believes everyone who needs it and wants it should have access to this technology. Rahmann said the company has a government affairs team whose job involves lobbying bodies like Congress about this type of technology; Ottobock, he said, strives to move their tech towards “as broad of a population as possible.”

“There is always a forgotten group that desperately need these devices so that they can return to living a normal life [and] return to work [and] be part of society, to contribute to society.” Rahmann said of the future. “We would give access to these devices to as many people as possible. That is the future of what I would love to see—that requires lobbying, government initiatives, and spreading awareness of the community we serve… making sure that they are seen and removing that stigma and making people realize these are normal human beings who deserve to contribute to society, just like able-bodied people do.”