The Hype and Hope of Prosthetics

Article Tools

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

Beyond that, I’ve been making some efforts outside the DARPA Project to commodify different components that might be useful for prosthetic arms, that don’t currently exist as products. With the Open Prosthetics Project, take my Open Board, for example, which is a digital signal processor that’s designed to process skin surface EMG [electromyographic] signals. At the same time that we're trying to develop that as a useful prosthetic control device, we’re also exploring the possibility of using that as a video game controller that might work with any of the major video game consoles. Our hope is to reach the sorts of people who like to do things on their own, like hardware hackers, to excite more people into improving and developing this product.

Somebody told me that last year people spent something like $35 billion worldwide on video games. So if that market gets excited about a device like this, and if there’s an open source aspect to it, we hope to be pulled along for the ride and repurpose it for prosthetics. Then we could get a jump in innovation, as well as lowering the price for consumers.

What has the consumer response to the Open Prosthetics Project been like so far?

Well, this is still pretty early. We’ve made just a few of these boards. One of the challenges that I point out in the IEEE article is that as soon as you start talking about hardware, and that means mechanical devices or actual computer boards that do something, then the barrier to entry is much higher. It’s not just someone downloading some software off the Internet. All of the sudden you have to make something or troubleshoot something or debug it, and it costs more. So we haven’t yet reached that critical mass where things are happening that have nothing to do with us. But I think we’re almost there. Hopefully, by the end of the year, I’ll be able to tell you that we have three or four different groups independent of us, working on the same hardware.

How does a major prosthetics manufacturer like Otto Bock Healthcare fit into that? Are they signed on to Open Source?

Not at all. We had a meeting at the myoelectric conference, which is the big electronic, powered prosthesis conference that occurs in Canada every year, and we were talking about the possibility of creating some sort of open control standard in the industry. The representatives from Otto Bock said in that forum that they were proceeding with their own proprietary control standard, and they had no intention of even licensing it at any price to anybody else. So that means that the control system they introduce, and I’m not sure when they’ll introduce it, will not be able to speak to components from any other manufacturer.

One of the discouraging things about all this is that people are making business decisions about a market that’s very small and unlikely to support much, if any, private research and development. What we’ve had is a bunch of public money being spent on this. So as both a consumer and a taxpayer, I think we have an imperative to try to make the most of the government’s investment. And having the government fund competing efforts that aren’t coordinated and can’t communicate with each other and don’t have interchangeable parts is short-sighted.

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print