Ultra-Sensitive Robotic Arm: Upgrade for Disabled Vets

As Kamen takes the stage for his three-minute talk, he explains that a “very senior” official in the Defense Department came to him last year. We have 1,600 kids who have come back from Iraq and Afghanistan without an arm, this official said, and right now we’re giving them a hook, the same technology we’ve used since the Civil War. Then the official told Kamen he wanted him to do the seeming impossible: Build a device so that these amputees can pick up a raisin or a grape and put it in their mouths without crushing it. And build it so that they can detect the difference between the two -- between the raisin and the grape -- by touch.

Kamen’s team built a prosthetic device that, he says, has 14 degrees of freedom, compared to the 21 degrees of freedom in the human arm. (“You don’t need the ones in the last two fingers,” Kamen says.) He shows a 30-second video of the arm in action: A wounded veteran uses its “fingers” to grab a water bottle and drink from it; to scratch his nose; to pick up a pen with his thumb and index finger; and to pick up a piece of paper, rotate it toward his face, and read it.