Prosthetic Arm From Segway Inventor Cleared by FDA | Hacker News Reader

Prosthetic Arm From Segway Inventor Cleared by FDA

businessweek.com

29 pointsroye8 comments

>DARPA has given DEKA $40 million since 2006 to develop the arm, Rick Weiss, a spokesman for the agency, said by phone. DEKA owns the patents and commercial rights for the device.

For some reason i continue to have problems every time I read something like this. Taxpayers fund all kinds of research through private enterprise or universities and all of it ends-up monetized by such entities. We even have to pay to have access to research papers stemming from research that would not have happened without our money. What's wrong wih this picture? Kamen has $40 million dollars of his own money. Why did we pay for it and hand over rights? It's like hiring someone to develop a website for you and then handing over all commercial interests on said site. Nuts.

It's actually worse than that. I did my PhD in a lab that did brain computer interfaces as part of the same DARPA initiative. We were supposed to use the DEKA arm but they insisted on owning all IP to come out of the research, even if it had nothing to do with robotics. Obviously that didn't happen. DEKA is basically Intellectual Ventures with better PR.

Url changed from http://www.theverge.com/2014/5/10/5703444/deka-mind-controll... since this one appears to be a more original source.

Agreed - thanks.

Could this be used to type on a keyboard? Or if anyone knows of a hand which would allow the wearer to do that?

I really like the general progress in this field and I can imagine in 5-10 years they will have completely functional prosthetics.

AFAIK, the arm runs one of several types of gestures -- modes -- that the user selects then controls. So It's not a general purpose hand. For typing, perhaps it'd be better for this thing to have a USB port, and plug in as a keyboard?

At least as of a couple years ago, that was true, and the way the arm was engineered was very deeply tied to these modes.

It would seem to me that if you're going to replace a hand with a prosthetic anyway, that it makes little sense to limit yourself to normal keyboards. Keyboards are designed with the limitations and function of human hands in mind. Why go to the effort to replicate a human hand so that you can use a keyboard, when you could just skip a step and design a prosthetic attachment that acts as a keyboard directly? Just a thought.

It wouldn't surprise me if, as prosthetics get better and better, they eventually surpass what human limbs are capable of (this has already happened to an extent with people with artificial hands able to rotate them by 180º). At that point, why not design something better than the human hand to start with? Seems like an interesting 'opportunity', if it can be called that.

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