Hi readers. According to a very senior person in the US Department of Defense, 1600 soldiers come home to the States missing at least one full arm, from the shoulders to the fingers. About 24 of these 1600 will lose both arms. And all the military has been able to get for them are crude proshetic arms.
After some persuading, Dean Kamen, founder of DEKA Research and Development, and his team created the DEKA Arm.
The Arm by the way is funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the US Army Research Office.
The Arm has 14 degrees of freedom as opposed to 21 degrees of freedom in the human arm. However, Kamen assured that we don't need the degrees of freedom in the last two fingers. The 14 actuators in the arm has its own capability to sense temperature and pressure so that the arm can sense whether the object it is holding is soft or hard.
The Arm won't look like in the picture above. Instead, DEKA will conduct a CAT and MRI scan of the person's good arm and produce a silicon rubber to coat the Arm. It will then be painted on to replicate the look of the other, good arm.
For a demonstration of the arm:
Story source: http://www.dekaresearch.com/deka_arm.shtml
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