Background

Today there is a great need in advances in the field of prosthetics. This demand is being generated in large measure by wounded veterans needing prosthetics. While new advances in body armor is saving lives, it is also leading to many limb injuries in soldiers who would not have usually survived. In the first two years of the Iraq war, over 200 soldiers lost limbs.

As the name implies, biomechatronics merges man with machine. It is an interdisciplinary field including biology, neuroscience and physics. Biomechatronic scientists create devices that interact with human muscle, bone and the nervous systems with the goal of "assisting or enhancing human motor control that can be lost or impaired by trauma, disease, or birth defects."(1)

While health care is still servicing wooden hands designed in the World War I era, many patients are unsatisfied with the unnatural movements, aesthetics, weight and lack of motion in these outdated prosthetics. Colonel Geoffrey Ling, a program manager for the Defense Advance Research Projects Agency (DARPA) who is overseeing a project to improve prosthetics says, "The best hand prosthetic one can get is a hook, right out of Peter Pan. It's heavy, it's clumsy and cosmetically, it's just horrid."(2)

That is why DARPA along with 70 million dollars to John Hopkin's Applied Physics Laboratory are spearheading the work. The projects goals are lofty: APL hopes to design an arm that can sense temperature, touch, and vibration, and that can sense the position of the arm and hand relative to the body. An arm that can tolerate heat, cold, water, humidity and dust. An arm that will allow an amputee to regain the fine motor control needed to thread a needle, use a computer keyboard, or play a piano or guitar. The arm must also fit comfortable enough to use for 18 hours a day, and have the internal power to work for a least 24 hours. And it has to last for 10 years. (3)