Dean Kamen "Luke" Prosthetic Arm
Honestly, guys watch the videos if you get a chance.
For the 1600 American soldiers returning with missing limbs there may finally be a prosthetic that looks and feels like a native arm. Dean Kamen along with his engineers at DEKA Research and Development Corporation have recently completed what many are calling the most advanced prosthetic arm ever produced.
See it for yourself:
As friends and family of amputees know, the "typical" prosthetic arm is little more than 2$ technology. A cable and a hook--the hook can open and close. It's the same technology used since the Civil War. While there are almost 300,000 amputees in North America, over 90% of them are amputated in the legs, leaving only 6000 people needing new arms each year. For businesses, that has been too small a market to push for significant improvement. So while Oscar Pistorious runs the Olympics on his prosthetic legs, veterans with blown off arms struggle to feed themselves. Yet, this was where the Department of Defense stepped in. Almost a year ago a senior executive from the Defense Department entered into Kaman's office and spoke to him pretty frankly. He said, "There are over 1600 kids coming back from war missing an arm. The good news is they don't die. The bad news is when they lose that arm, that arm is gone". The executive gave DEKA a two year contract for $18.1 million dollars to design an arm that would allow give back full functionality to amputees.
What DEKA came up with 1 year later was the "Luke arm", a 3.6 kg, fully autonomous prosthetic named after the lifelike arm worn by Luke Skywalker in Star Wars. The prosthetic uses 12 microprocessors with sophisticated electronics to allow sensory feedback. Depending on the level of damage the arm can be controlled via nerve, muscle, or signalling from a foot pedal. Works are being done to The arm is agile, gives back 18 degrees of freedom (compared to the 22 degrees in a working arm). Users can be trained in literally 5-10 hours to be able to stack cups, pick up grapes, shake hands, or run an electric screwdriver.
While the the DEKA design is novel in many ways, what's really amazing about the arm is how well it works at rerouting amputee's residual nerves to reproduce control of the phantom limb. Normally, nerves travel down the armpit, and into the arm. To get these nerves to work in sync with the prosthetic, these nerves were rerouted to the chest. When the amputee wants to move an arm, the nerve signal causes the chest muscle to contract allowing attached electrodes to sense the contraction and send a signal to the prosthetic arm. To receive "feedback" in the arm, a small vibrating motor (tactor) is attached against the user's skin. A sensor on the prosthetic, wired to a microprocessor, sends signals to the tactor varying with changes in grip. Light grip and the tactor slightly vibrates, tight grip and the vibration increases. This gives user's the ability to have precise motor control when holding onto objects of various size and shape.
Currently work is being done with the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory to better automate the process of nerve to prosthetic signalling without having to rely on muscle twitches in the chest.
Source:
posted by Pistachio Lore at 8:42 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home