[p2p-research] Dean Kamen’s prosthetic arm

[Ryan]

The state of the art for prosthetic limbs.

Sent to you by Ryan via Google Reader: Dean Kamen’s prosthetic arm via
Hack a Day on 10/1/09




60 minutes has covered [Dean Kamen]’s modular robotic arm. This thing
is light weight, adjustable for different body frame sizes, modular,
and eventually thought controlled. The system is currently functioning
quite well, as you can see in the video. Current testers are
controlling it with buttons under their toes, but the thought control
is in the later stages of development. Sounds like science fiction
right? You can see a monkey using a thought controlled arm to feed
itself grapes, though we don’t think it is [Dean]’s arm.

Another cool feature of this arm is the fact that it changes its grip
on your body depending on how much weight you are lifting. Lift
something heavy and it grips harder. Though it has a lot of the same
information, there is a little bit of different footage in [Dean]’s TED
talk about the arm.

It seems to us, with microcontrollers becoming so cheap and accessible
that we should be seeing more home made contraptions in this area. Are
any of you working with prosthetics?

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