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Clever Artificial Hand Developed
AccUser writes "The BBC is reporting that scientists have developed an ultra-light limb that they claim can mimic the movement in a real hand better than any currently available. Researcher Dr Paul Chappell, a medical physicist who worked on the device, said, 'With this hand you can clutch objects such as a ball, you can move the thumb out to one side and grip objects with the index finger in the way you do when opening a lock with a key, and you can wrap your fingers around an object in what we call the power grip - like the one you use when you hold a hammer or a microphone.'"
Image here
Dr Paul is now Dr Pauline after some over-enthusiastic power grip testing...
For those of you who have had their hands severed by their father, relief has come!
DxBlog - It's where you want to be
Oh c'mon You're making the jokes too easy for us!
;P
You have to hand it to the submitter
Wouldn't it be better to just give the patients mutant psychokinetic powers so they can levitate objects wherever they want? Oh I'm sorry, were you talking about things which can *actually* be achieved in the forseeable future?
This newly designed hand is only 400g unlike the two that you linked to which are 3.5kg and 1.15kg!! I know which one I would choose. I reckon I would look pretty funny walking with a lean and my wiz bang prosthetic knuckles dragging along the ground getting gravel rash :)
Aside from your solution being squarely in the realm of science fiction at the moment, while folks need hands now, people with disabilities don't want to screamed at every time they look down that they're something other than human (they get that enough from other people, sad but true). The hand is an assistive technology, true, but the goal should be that it "just works" and does so as unobtrusively as possible, so that it doesn't stick out any more than, say, glasses, contacts, cochlear implants, or hearing aids. Having your hand appear the consistency of frying eggs when attempting to pick up your glass at dinner time does not fulfill this important design goal.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
... and what about some sense of fashion for hearing aids?
You could make some with white ear buds, connect them to a white amplifier box with a circle on the front, and you'd be as flash as a rat with a gold tooth...
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
'The power grip will be mostly used to crush human sculls.' Dr Paul Chappell added.
Fight Frist Psoting!
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It's not the hand, or motor/servo, or interface that needs improving, it's the Power Source ! Without long-lasting (much better than iPod!) batteries, this technology will go nowhere. I did research in prosthetics back in '75 and won quite a few awards and acclaim for the work, but had the same problem. One solution that was presented back then, but not much work has been done on it since, is a blood-powered fuel cell. It is implanted in the body and derives power from sugar and oxygen. Next best thing would be a pee-powered battery (grin).
Chaos maximizes locally around me.