Don’t look for seeing-eye cheetahs anytime in the near future, but the agile cats may help disabled people in a surprising way – by inspiring better artificial legs.

One athlete has already benefited from research on animals: South African paralympic athlete Oscar Pistorius sprints on carbon fiber artificial feet called the "Cheetah".

Researchers are studying cheetahs hoping that by discovering what makes the cheetah the fastest land mammal in the world they'll discover the key to more sophisticated ways of helping humans run faster and designing human prosthetics.

Penny Hudson, Project Researcher, at the Royal Veterinary College told National Geographic, "We can measure all these different things from our cheetahs. So we measure things like how long their feet are on the ground for, how long their strides are, the curvature of spine as they're running, and we're doing all this to try and unlock some of the reasons as to why cheetahs are so much faster than other animals."

By investigating the minutiae of how this cat moves scientists hope to understand how the mechanics of the cheetah gallop can have applications in human health and medicine, particularly in the area of prosthetics and cerebral palsy.

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