Robert W. Mann, a mechanical engineer and designer who helped create advanced prosthetic joints, a Braille printing machine and devices to aid patients in rehabilitation, has died in Moultonborough, N.H. He was 81.
He died June 16 of a heart attack, his family said.
Beginning in the 1950s, Mr. Mann was an early practitioner in the field of rehabilitation engineering and helped guide students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the design of sound, vision and navigation systems to unfetter the handicapped.
Mr. Mann, who worked there for more than four decades, was named an emeritus professor of biomedical engineering in 1992.
In the 1960s and ’70s, Mr. Mann and others at MIT worked on a computer program for translating English text into Braille. The program was part of a larger project to develop a computer-directed Braille embossing machine intended to give the blind quicker access to printed material as it is published.
The result was a successful device, known as MIT Braillemboss, that printed efficiently and has seen broad use.
Among projects at MIT during the same period, Mr. Mann and his students produced a folding cane that was a low-technology solution to a formidable problem for the blind: how to stow a cane quickly when entering a car or other vehicle.
In the 1960s, Mr. Mann helped produce a complex prosthetic elbow that joined an electromechanical device with remnant muscle tissue, to enable amputees to perform a lifting action. The device became known as the “Boston arm.”
A colleague and collaborator, Derek Rowell, a professor of mechanical engineering at MIT, said that Mr. Mann was prominent in developing a prosthetic hip joint that is still in use.
