Dean Kamen's Luke Arm Reaches Clinical Trials

Posted 4 Feb 2008 at 19:17 UTC by steve

The two year DARPA funding for Dean Kamen's Luke Arm prosthesis has come to an end. DARPA has the option of giving Kamen's DEKA Research project a second round of funding to pay for clinical trials and FDA approval. An IEEE Spectrum article offers a short history of the project, named after Luke Skywalker's prosthesis. At the start of the program Kamen spent a few weeks studying currently available prosthetic arms and concluded they were still using "Flintstone's technology" unchanged since the Civil War, offering the user little more than 3 degrees of freedom and a hook. The Luke Arm is lighter than an average human arm and has 18 degrees of freedom, almost as many as the 22 in a human arm. The arm's interface is designed to support a variety of control mechanisms and can replicate the subtle movement of the human arm and hand: "The arm has motor control fine enough for test subjects to pluck chocolate-covered coffee beans one by one, pick up a power drill, unlock a door, and shake a hand".