Building a Better Arm: An Amputee Helps Engineer His Own Future

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Mine is indistinguishable from those worn by amputees after World War II, except in materials: silicones and plastics in the socket, carbon fiber instead of wood or fiberglass in the frame, titanium instead of steel in the hook, synthetic fiber instead of steel cable for control.

Imagine this pace of development for other everyday products. We would make our calls on big black rotary-dial telephones (lightweight carbon fiber body!) and add figures using punch cards (improved design!). If this seems preposterous for other industries, why is it the reality of the prosthetic arm industry?

The problem is the size of the market, which is just too small to provide any real incentives for innovation. In the modern conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, 862 U.S. troops have become amputees; only 186 had lost arms as of February 2009. The total arm amputee population in the United States is estimated to be under 100,000. Anyone who approached a venture capitalist with a business plan with significant technical challenges and only tens of thousands of potential customers would be laughed out of the room. The government is, and will remain, the only game in town as far as research and development in prosthetic arms.

The same year I lost my arm, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) began the Revolutionizing Prosthetics program, whose costs now total nearly $100 million. The program was split into two parts: The 2007 project, headed by DEKA Research and Development Corp., was given a two-year deadline to make a prosthetic arm with the world’s best existing technologies.

The 2009 program is spearheaded by Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory. APL’s goal is to create prosthetics that would, as the hype had it, be “thought controlled.” But the team wanted more than control for amputees; they also wanted to restore the ability to feel heat, cold, pressure, and surface texture. I found out about the program at Walter Reed when I was first being fitted for prosthetics, and I was anxious to get on board. Now I’m one of more than 300 engineers at over 30 institutions worldwide working on the APL project. I’m helping with suspension (attaching the arm to the body), grasping control, and system design.

At this point, no one is even trying to make a hand that will let a user win a Rubik’s Cube competition or play the piano. It’s just not yet possible to perform tasks that require such dexterity in real time.

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