Follow along with the video below to see how to install our site as a web app on your home screen.
Note: This feature currently requires accessing the site using the built-in Safari browser.
Retired U.S. Marine Corps Capt. Jon Kuniholm (left) and Army Maj. Marc Hoffmeister pause during roped team movement on Pika Glacier in Alaska, 2008.
Few entrepreneurs can claim as intimate a connection to their products as Jonathan Kuniholm. As an engineer working at the forefront of some of the latest research to improve prosthetic arms, Kuniholm discovered that the efforts had overlooked a much simpler but utterly crucial question for improving amputees quality of life: how can they benefit from devices if they dont wear them at all?
Kuniholm has been trying to answer that question for the past eight years.
Electrodes attached to the arm detect muscle contractions close to the prosthesis, and a computer translates them into movement, the Food and Drug Administration said last week. As many as 10 movements can be detected by the limb, which is the same weight and shape as a natural human arm. The company, closely held DEKA Research and Development Corp. of Manchester, N.H., developed the arm with financing from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the U.S. Army Research Office, according to DEKA's website. The company nicknamed the arm "Luke," after the "Star Wars" movie character Luke Skywalker, who receives a bionic hand after losing his natural one in a light saber battle with his father, Darth Vader. "Think about our military personnel, who can be great beneficiaries of these devices: before DARPA made an investment in this area the best we could give back to them was metal hooks," Justin Sanchez, a program manager in the agency's new Biological Technologies office, said in a phone interview. "This is a landmark moment for DARPA as an agency."
The DEKA limb can provide "near natural upper-arm extremity control" to amputees and the device is modular so that it can be fitted to people who've suffered any degree of limb loss, from an entire arm to a hand, Sanchez said. Six "grip patterns" allow wearers to drink a cup of water, hold a cordless drill or pick up a credit card or a grape, among other functions. DARPA has given DEKA $40 million since 2006 to develop the arm, Rick Weiss, a spokesman for the agency, said by phone. DEKA owns the patents and commercial rights for the device.
The limb won't be available for sale and a price won't be determined until DEKA finds a commercial partner to mass- manufacture it, said Matt Albuquerque, president of Next Step Bionics & Prosthetics Inc. in Manchester, N.H., which helped DEKA develop the device. DARPA's money was crucial to attract Kamen to the project, Albuquerque said, calling him "probably one of our generation's greatest inventors." "Without that kind of money it would be difficult to attract the kind of people I think that we need to solve the problem we're trying to solve," he said. A DEKA spokeswoman didn't return a phone call and email seeking comment on FDA's approval. Kamen's Segway is a two- wheeled electric scooter introduced in 2001. He also developed a water-purification device, the Slingshot, intended to help people in developing countries who don't have access to clean water.
The limb works by attaching electrodes to the surface of remaining arm or shoulder muscles, or to the legs of amputees, Albuquerque and Sanchez said. When amputees flex the muscles that would have previously been involved in moving their arm or fingers, the DEKA limb moves accordingly. "They don't need to control the shoulder, the elbow and the hand; it's all able to work together in one motion," Albuquerque said. Alternatively, the limb can be controlled with leg movements, Sanchez said. Signals are transmitted wirelessly. "The research down the road is when something is implanted in the muscle, and a signal is wirelessly transferred to the arm," Albuquerque said. "That's really the beginning of the $6 million man."
Innovative prosthetic arm from Segway inventor cleared by US - U.S. - Stripes
Say what? Government funded research didn't do it? The dreaded corporate greed of the private sector get's a pat on the back.
Kamen, who also invented the Segway Human Transporter and the first wearable insulin pump for diabetics, hopes the arm, developed with $40 million in federal money, won't be a big seller."We just know relative to most medical equipment, it's very, very, very small (in number), and we hope it stays that way," Kamen said last week at his DEKA headquarters in the Millyard. "We are not looking to expand the market for our Luke arm by having this country continue to send young brave people out in the world to have interactions with IEDs and terrorists by which they lose their arms, so we don't think it will ever be a big business," he said. "We didn't start making these things because we thought it would be a big business," Kamen said. "We made these things because these soldiers deserve the best possible technology that's available."
Extra flexibility
The fingers, thumb, wrist, elbow and shoulder all move on the arm, which weighs about the same as a human arm but provides greater wrist flexibility with 270-degree rotation, he said. A person will be able to order specific parts of the prosthetic arm, such as a hand and a wrist, he said. And sensors the size of a matchbook help guide the Luke arm, named after the Star Wars character Luke Skywalker. "If they wiggle their foot up and down, your arm goes up and down. If they tip their foot in and out, their arm moves in and out," Kamen said. "If they do some other motion with another of one of our sensors, the hand becomes a fist or it can grab a grape or it can open a doorknob, so we worked very hard to make ways to remotely control the arm from other pieces of your body that you already have control over," he said. "I think to some people this is a very bionic arm because when you watch it move, it looks so eerily real that the average person might say, this is an early example of what's going to come to be the integration of engineering components in a biological human system," Kamen said.
Gets OK from FDA
In May, the Food and Drug Administration allowed DEKA to pursue manufacturing and commercial opportunities for the arm. He said his team is looking for a company to make up to two thousand arms over a period of years. He hopes the cost to manufacture them would run less than $100,000 each but expects a private company would add to that the costs for maintenance and training staff as well as an amount of profit, he said. "If we can't find a medical company that is ready, willing and able to do that, as we told DARPA, we will do it, but it's not our first choice; it's our backup plan," Kamen said, hoping some government agency will purchase the arms for wounded warriors. DARPA is the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, part of the U.S. Department of Defense with a mission to create breakthrough technologies for national security.
DARPA provided DEKA "approximately $40M (million) in total since 2006 for its work on the DEKA Arm System," the agency's public affairs department said in an email. "DARPA is a place where we can bring dreams to life," Dr. Geoffery Ling, director of DARPA's biological technologies office, said in a statement. Kamen said that money was spread among various companies that teamed up to produce the arm. According to Kamen's office, about 30 DEKA people worked solely on the Luke arm and about 100 other engineers worked on some aspect. How much money DEKA received for its share of the work wasn't immediately available, his office said.
Early approval
The Luke arm already is winning praise from wounded U.S. soldiers who tested it. "Here are young people that have literally given up their arms, and we're giving them back something that is way, way better than a hook, which is what they had, but it's nowhere as good as the original equipment," Kamen said. "I'm not naive. I would not take one of my arms off and be happy to replace it with the Luke arm, and yet the most singular consistent characteristic of every one of these soldiers is how grateful they are that somebody is giving them something that improves their lives," Kamen said. "It almost makes you feel guilty. We should be thanking them and instead, they are thanking us. It's just not right."
Segway inventor creates new prosthetic arm for military amputees - U.S. - Stripes
Artificial hands that look real have been on the market for some time. Now, researchers are creating prosthetic devices that have the sense of touch and exhibit a full range of motion like the missing appendage. One prosthetic, an artificial arm developed by Swedish researchers, is attached to the remaining bone within the amputated limb of the wearer. Electrodes implanted under the skin receive motor impulses and translate them into movement. Biomedical engineer Max Ortiz Catalan of Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden, helped develop the life-like artificial arm. “Some of those muscles are still there. The nerve cells [are] still there," said Catalan. "So we can pick up those signals coming down from the brain and use them to tell the prosthesis what to do.”
Mind control
Catalan and co-researchers describe the mind-controlled artificial arm implanted in a male patient, a truck driver who lost his arm a decade ago, in Science Translational Medicine. Before the implant, the man controlled the prosthesis, imperfectly, through electrodes placed on his skin. But now, Catalan said, the man has complete, stable movement and use of the arm. “The patient is using it on his in activities of ... daily living, and playing with his kids, and doing stuff at his home and working. So, he went from working from 50 percent to working 100 percent and he can wear the prosthesis all day.” Catalan says researchers plan to start implanting the device in patients with amputated arms beginning next year. Now, imagine an artificial hand that actually feels sensation.
Feeling sensation
In a second paper in the journal, Dustin Tyler and colleagues at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, describe how they used implanted electrodes to stimulate sensation in an entire prosthetic limb. “They have an artificial hand, but what they feel is as though it is their hand. And so we are applying electrical stimulation techniques directly to the nerves that used to go to the sensors in the real hand. And so by activating those, their perception is that it is their real hand,” he said.
Man wearing prosthetic arm directly connected to his bone, nerves, and muscles, at work, undisclosed location.
The experimental device that creates sensation in a prosthetic hand sits in a box on a desk in the laboratory, much to the disappointment of the two men who have been part of the experiment for some two years. “You know, one of our subjects basically said when he leaves he has to leave his hand behind because he can not have the sensation outside of the lab," Tyler said. "So, the feeling of their hand back is so powerful, they would like to have this [feeling] continually.” Tyler said the goal now is to make the device portable by implanting a controller, possibly in the chest. He said it would be possible to integrate the technology into the mind-controlled prosthetic arm developed by Swedish researchers to make the artificial hand even more like a real one.
Scientists Create Mind-Controlled Prosthetics That Move Feel Sensations
This got some scientists to thinking about ways to keep our very expensive robotic probes from getting sidelined by something as inconsequential as a sand trap. And they are taking their cues from Mother Nature. In an experiment at Zoo Atlanta, deadly sidewinder rattlesnakes were put into a specially designed sandbox with adjustable inclines. Scientists used high-speed video cameras to track the position of the snakes as they moved sideways up slopes of different grades, a movement called sidewinding. The snakes proved to be agile climbers even in shifting sand. Daniel Goldman, an associate professor of physics at the George Institute of Technology, now knows how they did it.
A sidewinder rattlesnake moves with little effort up sandy inclines
Sidewinders don't sink in sand
Writing in the journal Science, he and colleagues from Georgia Tech, Zoo Atlanta and Carnegie Mellon University are the first to explain this serpentine movement. He says what they saw was, “as the incline angle increased, more of the snake’s body was on the ground.” But that discovery wasn't the end of the experiment. Next into the sand pit was MOD-Snake, a meter-long robot composed of 16 identical modules, each six centimeters in diameter. Goldman says the bot, developed at Carnegie Mellon University, has a long history of getting in and out of tight places. "It turned out that they had actually been using the sidewinder gait in their robot for many years to traverses all kinds of ground, but always had trouble on sandy dune inclines," he said.
Robot programmed with new moves
Goldman says once researchers quantified the real snake's wave-like movement into programmable data, the next step was to get the robot to climb in the same way. “And those same waves existed in the robot and allowed it to make its maneuvers and allowed us to modify those waves to make the kind of maneuvers that the snake did on sandy dunes of different inclines, that is laying down more robot as the hill angle increased,” he said.
CMU scientists adapt the snake robot model from what they learn about how sidewinder rattlesnakes move
The researchers ran the same experiment with other snakes closely related to the rattler, and they all failed miserably to sidewind up the inclines. Zoo Atlanta research director Joe Mendelson says the robot model helped explain those failures. “We found a really fascinating system where the snake informs what the robot can do, and then we can manipulate the robot to do the things that either the snake won’t do or can’t do," he said. "And so we have this self-informing system that has really opened up new parameters within snake biology and robotics.”
Snake-like robot future in tight places
Mendelson adds that the next generation of Mod-Snake may be deployed to save lives or explore remote regions on Earth or in space. “Robots are expensive. And if a robot gets stuck in the sand that’s a problem, especially if that sand happens to be on one or another planet, or a very distant from an exploration post. And we realized going into this, that sidewinders never ever, ever get stuck on sand," he said. The researchers hope the new sidewinder bot will navigate sand dunes just as well.
Robot Takes Cues from Deadly Rattlesnakes
