Next Generation Mind-Controlled Limb Prostheses
This is one of those advances that Sci-Fi novels and films have been promising for years, but the technology has always failed to deliver. Dean Kamen, who you may know from such inventions as the Segway Human Transporter, has had a load of American military investment and has been working on replacement limbs for returning veterans, and the video above shows the results of his work, a robot arm dubbed 'Luke' (as in Skywalker, he of the missing hand).
Maybe it would be better if they didn't blow the limbs off people first before putting military-scale budgets into these projects.
The fault, I believe, lies in the for-profit medical industry in America. To quote Kamen himself, "There was no financial incentive to create a next-generation prosthetic arm. The research and development costs were enormous. Unless funded by DARPA, no private company would take such a risk for such a comparatively small market (in the Americas, about 6000 people require arm prostheses each year)". So, the only way America can motivate it's cleverest people to work on such obviously interesting and incredible work is through their obscene military budget, rather than through public investment in publically available medical technology.
Putting our ethics aside for a minute or two, the result is staggering. A lightweight arm, with all the same range of motion of a human arm and hand. It has feedback for grip pressure, and they have one guy on the video controlling it with a neural interface. For once this is a military project that has some serious use out in the real world. I'm sure amputees the world over will be ready to mortgage their housesand sell their first-born to get their hands (terrible pun) on this technology.
Hopefully the draconian american intellectual property laws won't stop dozens of other companies around the world from developing their own versions and expanding this market quickly. Within a few years we every amputee in the developed world should be able to afford a replacement limb for no more than the cost of any other large purchase such as a car or a powerful computer.
I wonder now how long it will be before a prosthetic is available which is capable of all the subtleties I've taught my biological hands to do? Play instruments, juggle, fan cards, vanish coins - all these things that I spent years learning, I may soon be able to download a macro for my robot arm that will do it all perfectly, time and time again. Finally, will this be the breakthough that gets me the tail I've been longing after all these years?
Tags: robotics, technology, prosthesis
