This is great news for amputees everywhere. Note this person lost their arm in a vehicle accident, not combat.
Mitchell, who lives in Ellicott City, is the fourth person — and first woman — to receive a “bionic” arm, which allows her to control parts of the device by her thoughts alone. The device, designed by physicians and engineers at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago, works by detecting the movements of a chest muscle that has been rewired to the stumps of nerves that once went to her now-missing limb.
Mitchell and the first person to get a bionic arm — a power-line technician who lost both arms to a severe electric shock — will demonstrate their prostheses today at a news event in Washington. The Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago is part of a multi-lab effort, funded with nearly $50 million from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), to create more useful and natural artificial limbs for amputees.
Once they take care of the cosmetics and refine the design a bit I could see someone using a bionic arm without anyone being able to detect it without careful observation.
Looks pretty cool, in a cyberpunk kinda way.
I’d bet she thinks it’s REALLY cool!
Now they just have to get costs down.
You go girl!!
what is better not have an arm, or having an arm that looks like that?
If you don’t have the one, you need the other. Self-sufficiency is more valuable than cosmetics, and the looks will improve as the technology matures.
“I could see someone using a bionic arm without anyone being able to detect it without careful observation”
Until they make a cell phone call and the radiation sends the arm haywire!
“Note this person lost their arm in a vehicle accident, not combat.”
What the heck does this statement have to do with ANYTHING? She lost it in a powerline accident. Guess we should Pull out of distribution of electricty, too, huh?
#7 Golly Gee Max… Maybe it was to stave the inevitable comments about Iraq made by idiots who will just assume this arm was lost in combat. You know, so the comments would focus on the arm and not fly off on some dumb ass tangent like whether or not we should get out of power distribution.
You were given a free peice of unloaded information. Just take it and be happy.
The is just a taste of what is in store for us. Immortality will be achieved by downloading our consciousness onto a hard disk drive.
7 – She actually lost her arm in a motorcycle accident (she was the rider). The guy that did the demo with her, missing both arms, lost his arms during a powerline accident.
The technology is very interesting. They actually take the nerves that would normally continue down your arm, and relocate them from your armpit area to the side of your chest. Trying to move your (inexistent) arm sends the nerve signals to the muscles in the area where the nerves are now relocated, flexing the muscles. This is then detected by electrodes touching but not permanently attached to the skin, measured for intensity, and translated to motion of the arm.
By separating and relocating the original nerves properly, they can control all the way down to finger motion.
Artificial legs are next, but not really necessarily in a bipedal self-balancing system. Just do the same kind of hookup to a wheelchair controller (or an updated/patched Segway type device).
The next step is to tap directly into where the impulses originate. Prosthetic control would be an optional software module in a cranial computing system.
(Shameless plug here to download my techno-thriller involving computers in the brain for free.)
Does it go ‘na na na na na na na na na’ when she uses it? (Guess what my favorite TV show was when I was a kid.)
Not EXACTLY off-topic:
Q) What did Captain Hook die of?
A) Hemorrhoids.
What always bugged me about the six-million dollar man is that no matter how strong his bionic arms or legs are, they’re still attached to a flesh body (they even show in the opening credits that the limbs are tacked on without an interconnecting support structure). The arm may be strong enough to pick up a car, but it’ll rip itself off of your shoulder in the process.
(Joe Haldean addressed a similar issue on the strength of powered spacesuits vs. glove material integrity in his book The Forever War.)
14. Smartalix, two letters, man: TV. Actually, more impressive is that he was tossing Farah Fawcett around on his silk sheets IN REAL LIFE!