"Gentlemen, we can rebuild him. We have the technology. We have the capability to make the world's first bionic man. Steve Austin will be that man. Better than he was before. Better ... stronger ... faster."
Well, maybe not better, faster, or stronger yet, but it works. A man in Dayton Tennessee has two prosthetic arms and is painting his house and using a ladder to do it. It's possible because one of the arms is bionic and controlled by his thoughts.
Doctors describe Sullivan as the first amputee with a thought-controlled artificial arm. Millions were spent on the technology, and a researcher says the retail price would be about $100,000 for a pair. But doctors have asked Sullivan not to pamper the arms. Sullivan's prosthetic right arm is relatively simple, a motor-operated limb with a hook. But his thought-controlled bionic arm represents a real advance. The U.S. government, spurred by the growing count of soldiers who have lost limbs in Iraq and Afghanistan, is spending millions of dollars and working with universities and private companies to develop artificial limbs that connect body and mind.
Sullivan said he's proud to test the bionic arm for such soldiers. "Those guys are heroes in my book, and they should have the best there is," Sullivan said. "Hopefully they have got 60 or 70 years in front of them." The military's research-and-development wing — known as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA — wants to develop a mechanical arm that mimics the real thing by 2009.
Link:
http://www.tennessean.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AI D=/20060813/NEWS01/608130362/1006/NEWS
At a previous job I worked on an artificial muscle project. The muscle was a liquid crystal elastomer which is a flexible polymer with liquid crystals inside. By heating the LCE we could get it to contract as the liquid crystal went from Nematic phase to Isotropic phase. Really interesting work.
Amazing!
