Tag Archives: Prosthetic
Colorado man gets first-ever pair of mind-controlled prosthetic arms
This story has a personal angle for me, but I’ll get to that in a minute. Last week, a story made the rounds that for the first time ever, a double-amputee was fitted with mind-controlled prosthetic arms, and remember, that’s the only way to control prosthetic arms, and was able to control both of them simultaneously with his mind.
This is the first time ever that someone has controlled *two* artificial limbs with their mind, so it’s a big milestone. One other thing to keep in mind is that, according to this story at NBC News, significantly more money is spent by the VA on prosthetic legs as opposed to prosthetic arms, and prosthetic arms have more difficulty when it comes to engineering functionality into them. As the article states, walking is straightforward, but arms need to be able to reach, grab, feel, interact, control, etc. and that is proving troublesome. Even so, we have seen absolutely incredible advances in artificial arms and hands.
Now for the personal part: This was all achieved at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab outside of Baltimore, and I have two very good friends who work there so I am very proud at a personal level for this breakthrough. It’s remarkable and a major step forward.
Here’s a video from the APL, and it is really incredible how smoothly it seems to go there at the end when he is actually using the arms. Amazing stuff.
