Dean Kamen’s Robotic “Luke” Arm
Writing by Evan Ackerman on Wednesday, 13 of February , 2008 at 6:47 am
If you’re not familiar with Dean Kamen, you should be: although he’s best known for inventing the Segway, he has also invented all sorts of other robotic and medical devices, and currently runs FIRST (a robotics/engineering organization for students) as well the Deka Research & Development Corporation (he also knows a thing or two about sci-fi). Deka has been working on the “Luke” robotic prosthesis on a DARPA grant; it’s designed to be a readily available and easily customizable replacement arm “for people who want to literally strap it on and go.” Most prosthetic arms currently available are so ineffectual that amputees just give up on them, and because the market is so small (only about 6,000 are needed every year) there isn’t much financial incentive for large companies to develop an effective technology.
Thanks to a two year, $18 million DARPA grant, Deka has managed to create a modular robotic arm that’s the same size, shape, and weight as a human arm that sports 18 degrees of freedom, only 4 less than a human arm has. The arm is fully self-contained, with internal motors, batteries, and circuit boards that have been folded up to save space. The interface can either be surgical (the user controls the arm through existing nerves) or mechanical (a small joystick controls the arm and provides vibration feedback to indicate grip strength). As you can see, it’s amazingly effective when it comes to precision and dexterity:
The future of the Luke arm is, at the moment, in doubt… In order for the arm to be commercialized, it has to be approved by the FDA, which means costly clinical trials that aren’t covered by the DARPA grant. Deka needs to find some additional funding somewhere (maybe from other government sources) to complete the trials and move the arm on to a manufacturer. Now that the bulk of the R&D is more or less finished, the Luke arm could be on the market in as few as two years, if the FDA approves. The cost? Likely somewhere north of the $100,000 that current state of the art prosthetic arms go for, but for those 6,000 people every year, I can only imagine that it would be worth it.
Category: Medical
- Add this post to
- Del.icio.us -
- Digg
Comment by Dave Eaton
Made Saturday, 23 of February , 2008 at 4:32 pm
Fascinating.
The technology for doing this work, which I think is close to the pinnacle of the human good that engineering does, has been driven by all the ‘trivial’ applications of electronics. It is marvelous. Maybe I don’t ‘need’ a cellphone/video/gps/pogostick, but if the consumer demand for such things enables miracles and wonders like this to come to life, it gives those baubles that we buy a significance that transcends their everyday use.
Great blog.