60 Minutes had a report yesterday about the Army’s efforts to create artificial arms for amputees. Prosthetics, until now, haven’t changed since they were first invented. Now efforts are being made to tie the artificial limbs into the users nervous system and give them greater utility. 60 Minutes focuses on the efforts of Dean Kamen and his work for DARPA. (via memeorandum)
One of the scientists Ling asked to join the team is Dean Kamen, a sort of rock star in the world of inventors. His creations include dozens of medical devices, and the Segway.
They are inventions which have made him a multimillionaire.
“When the folks from the Defense Department came to this office and said, ‘Here’s what we need,’ what did they tell you?” Pelley asked.
“We want these kids to have something put back on them that will essentially allow one of these kids to pick up a raisin or a grape off a table, know the difference without looking at it. That is an extraordinary goal,” Kamen explained.
“He basically said, ‘You’re crazy.’ That’s what he told us,” Ling remembered. “He said flat out, he and he himself, who’s a crazy guy himself, I mean he is very innovative thinking. He’s a brilliant man, totally brilliant man, but mad scientist.”
Kamen told Pelley he thought the Pentagon and DARPA were unbelievably optimistic in their expectations and that he told them that.
“He said to us, he said, ‘I can do my, you’re crazy. But, we’re willing to rise to this, rise to the challenge because it’s important,'” Ling remembered.
Towards the end of the segment, 60 MInutes correspondent Scott Pelley interviews Capt. Jon Kuniholm about the efforts. Kuniholm is not only a scientist working on artificial arms, he lost an arm four years while in patrol in Iraq. Kuniholm is also involved in other parallel efforts, including “Air Guitar Hero,” an effort to differentiate between fine tune an amputee’s control over their limbs.
Inspired by Wii-hab, Armiger and colleague Jacob Vogelstein borrowed a colleague’s copy of Guitar Hero and attacked the controller with a soldering iron. They rewired the standard guitar-shaped controller to take instructions from the VIE.
Next they substituted muscle contractions for button presses. In particular, they had to rejigger the inputs. Two-handed gamers normally play by using one hand to press colored “fret†buttons to correspond to the correct notes while using the other hand to push a “strum†button in time with the note. Onscreen, these same five colored buttons scroll down the display in time with the notes the players are supposed to hit. To correctly play a note, the player must press the right color fret button and the strum button with the opposite hand.
But Vogelstein and Armiger wanted to use the game to train an amputee. So first they needed to make the game’s controls one-handed. They did that by wiring the two controls together so that an input from a muscle contraction would be read by the VIE as a simultaneous “fret†and “strum.â€
One aspect of the story left out by 60 Minutes, is the role of open source thinking involved in improving prosthetic technology.
The two prostheses from Walter Reed were state-of-the-art, the latest in prosthetic design. But back in North Carolina, Kuniholm and his partners at Tackle Design were shocked at the lack of innovation in arm and hand prostheses. They were sure they could do better. And that is how the small North Carolina design firm got into the prosthetics business. More, Kuniholm and his partners have created a clearinghouse for prosthetic designs, an online consortium they call the Open Prosthetics Project (OPP), whose goal is to nurture useful ideas for innovations and then freely give the designs away. The idea is to benefit not only people such as Kuniholm, who already have the resources that come from living in a first-world economy, but also amputees all over the world.
Here’s an IEEE video of an interview with Dean Kamen as he explains his “Luke” arm.
Crossposted on Soccer Dad.
