limb

Alternative Limb Project creates gorgeously surreal prosthetics

It's hard to imagine life without a limb -- not just the physical difficulties, but how it might affect your relationship with your body, and your sense of how you're perceived by the world around you. One prosthetist is taking into account not just restoring limb function, but also the wearer's personality and style.

The Alternative Limb Project is the work of Sophie de Oliveira Barata, who, taking her honors degree from the London Arts University studying special-effects prosthetics, went to work as a sculptor for a prosthetics company. In her eight years there, she created realistic limbs and digits for amputees who wanted their new limbs to blend into their bodies.

de Oliveira Barata has continued this work with the Alternative Limb Project, and her realistic limbs, molded from casts of the customer's own body, are incredibly detailed. But some people prefer to stand out in a crowd. … Read more

Practice for your bionic hand with Virtu-limb

In the future, we'll all have cyborg bodies with replaceable parts, right? The transition to immortality, though, may take some getting used to. Touch Bionics has a handy new tool to help us practice.

The Scottish maker of the i-Limb Pulse bionic hand is showing off its new Virtu-limb, a tool it describes as "a groundbreaking simulation and training product for myoelectric upper limb prostheses." … Read more

Bionic-armed driver dies after crash

Update at 10:00 a.m. PDT: BBC News reported Friday that Christian Kandlbauer "was pronounced brain-dead in intensive care...and his life support was switched off." The story has been updated throughout to reflect this.

Christian Kandlbauer, who was fitted with an experimental bionic arm after losing both arms when he was shocked by a 20,000-volt power line in 2005, has died following a car accident in Austria.

In hopes of leading a normal life again, he had become a guinea pig in a four-year research project on a novel bionic arm.

The 22-year-old had fought … Read more

Mind-controlled bionic arm goes for test drive

If you've watched the movie "The Men Who Stare at Goats," you'd know it's all about covert efforts by the military to develop mind control. Well, good luck to them. However, it may be a bit premature to write off mind control as so much paranormal "X-File"-ish diddle-dee-doo, considering that Germany-based Otto Bock HealthCare has just done the seemingly impossible with a mind-controlled robotic arm.

The limb in question is attached to 21-year-old Christian Kandlbauer, an Austrian man who lost both his arms four years ago after being electrocuted by a whopping … Read more

Bionic hand can bear 200-pound loads

Touch Bionics has upgraded its bionic i-Limb Hand with a model that features controllable grip strength, miniaturized components, and rugged aluminum construction that can bear loads up to about 200 pounds.

To be unveiled next week at Orthopaedie + Reha-Technik 2010 in Leipzig, Germany, the i-Limb Pulse uses high-frequency electronic pulses to drive each digit motor to gradually tighten its grip on objects such as shoelaces or belts. This gives users better control over intricate grasping motions.

Users can control preset digit and grip postures, for instance a pointing index finger, with Bluetooth-enabled software called MyBioSim, which can also be used … Read more

BeBionic hand easy on eggs, tough on Coke cans

British prosthesis maker RSLSteeper is readying a myoelectric bionic hand that will let users perform detailed movements such as picking up wooden tiles in the game Jenga or grasping objects with a "power grip" feature.

Little information is available, but RSLSteeper says the BeBionic hand will have the world's first "powered wrist with rotation as well as flexion/extension." Lifelike silicone skin covering the hand will be available in 19 shades.

Myoelectric prostheses can be controlled by detecting electrical nerve signals in the skin of the remaining portion of a limb.

The hand's speed, … Read more

Artificial foot recycles energy with every step

Researchers at the University of Michigan and Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands have created a prosthesis that makes walking much easier on amputees than current options. The trick: an artificial foot that recycles the kinetic energy generated by walking.

The device, detailed Wednesday in the journal PLoS One, works by mimicking the natural push-off of a human ankle, using a microprocessor to control the device and capture the energy normally dissipated by the leg:

In tests on subjects walking with an artificially impaired ankle, a conventional prosthesis reduced ankle push-off work and increased net metabolic energy expenditure by … Read more

Bionic fingers give amputees upper hand

As Eric Jones fought off cancer a few years ago, his weakened immune system left him vulnerable to strep pneumonia and sepsis, which developed into the blood-clotting disorder known as Disseminated Intravascular Coagulation.

Without enough blood supply to his extremities, he wasn't expected to come out of a month-long, medical-induced coma and be able to keep his arms and feet.

Jones was fortunate to fare better than expected, but he did lose movement in his left hand, his right hand's fingers and thumb, his toes, and parts of his feet. Even with intensive physical therapy and the aid of crutches, his mobility was severely affected, and he was unable to do such previously simple tasks as walk while holding a coffee mug, play Legos with his kids, or perform on the piano.

Enter ProDigits, believed to be the world's first powered bionic finger solution, whose commercial launch developer Touch Bionics announced Tuesday. With a silicone skin designed specifically to fit around his right hand, the ProDigits prosthesis gave Jones, who began to use the latest model this summer, a movable thumb.

In other words, it gave him opposition, without which the hand is considered to be 40 percent impaired.

"I didn't want to wait even one more day before I could start using it," Jones says. "ProDigits offers me functionality that I can't get anywhere else; it offers me the ability to grasp... I can pick something up and walk out to the car with it, rather than have to put it in a bag. Most importantly, I'm able to take care of my kids--play games with my kids, take them to school, make dinner."

Touch Bionics is probably best known for its i-Limb Hand, a full-hand prosthetic with five individually powered digits released in 2006. ProDigits takes this prosthetic a step further, because it caters to patients like Jones with partial hands on a case-by-case basis. The sockets themselves are custom-designed by clinicians to suit individual needs.… Read more

Medical tools top WSJ's tech innovation awards

For The Wall Street Journal's ninth annual technology innovation awards, editor Michael Totty reviewed nearly 500 entries and, with a team of judges, weighed which of the top 180 were the most groundbreaking and which were most likely to prove useful during economic hardship. The top two awards both went to medical technologies, besting energy-efficient next-generation LEDs and paper-thin flexible speakers. Affordable health tech seems to have impressed the judges as its own sort of innovation.

The gold award went to the Ibis T5000, a sensor developed by Abbott Laboratories and its Ibis Biosciences unit that can quickly detect … Read more