The next-gen prosthetic arm being developed by DEKA Research and
Development, Dean Kamen’s skunkworks, up in Manchester, NH is being
funded by DARPA, the people who brought you the Internet. Great video.
When Kamen, one of America’s best-known inventors, first spoke with
officers at the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency,
they told him they were looking for a research and development group
that could build a prototype of a new prosthetic arm. Kamen was
expecting to hear a list of technical specifications, such as how much
the arm would need to lift and how many moving joints it would require.
Instead, Kamen says, the Pentagon officials told him they wanted to
create an arm that could "pick up a raisin or a grape from a table,
know the difference without looking at it, and be able to manipulate it
into the person’s mouth without breaking it or dropping it."
Here’s the video, which includes Kamen’s perspective on the project, as well as a lot of demo footage.
DEKA also is working on another DARPA project, which we didn’t talk
about when I was there in late September: a project called PowerSwim,
the goal of which is to increase the speed and efficiency of human
swimmers (ummm, Navy SEALs, perhaps?) by about 50 percent. More on that
here and here.
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