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Luke Prosthetic Arm Approved By FDA
necro81 writes: "The FDA today approved the Luke prosthetic arm for sale. The Luke Arm, created by Dean Kamen's DEKA R&D Corp., was a project initiated by DARPA to develop a prosthetic arm for wounded warriors more advanced than those previously available. The Arm can be configured for below-the-elbow, above-the-elbow, and shoulder-level amputees. The full arm has 10 powered degrees of freedom and has the look and weight of the arm it replaces. Through trials by DEKA and the Dept. of Veterans Affairs, the Arm has been used by dozens of amputees for a total of many thousands of hours. Commercialization is still pending."
I suspect two main classes of reason (in addition to purely visceral distaste):
1. Prosthetics tend to exploit whatever remnant limb is available, from relatively primitive 'cup' type attachments that fit over a stump all the way to cutting edge nerve interface implants that allow conscious control of the prosthesis. These just aren't available for limbs that humans never have: even in the case of complete amputation, you still get to take advantage of the skeleton being set up for a load-bearing attachment in a given location, not so if a limb doesn't go there.
2. In practice, humans use 'prosthetic' aids all the time, they just don't imitate limbs all that closely and are often left at the work site. Just think of all the various clamps, vises, jigs, tripods, stands, etc, etc, etc, that act as 3rd through Nth hands during operations that require them. It tends to be far easier and cheaper to skip trying to replicate the (highly complex, but very versatile) structure of the hand and just knock together some relatively simple, task specific, tool, possibly a collection of them used for a sequence of assembly operations.
The United States has been at war literally continuously since September 2001. "Warrior" is exactly accurate.
"Soldier" on the other hand, is both imprecise and inaccurate. "Soldier" refers mainly to those who serve in the Army. Air Force personnel are all "Airmen", even those who serve on the ground (often behind enemy lines). "Sailors" is the term for Navy personel. And Marines are just Marines and decidedly NOT soldiers.
As much as you flap your gums about "propaganda", you seem to know very little about the meaning of the words you are criticizing.
It's being marketed as a medical device, and the FDA also has authority over medical devices. They approve things like MRI machines and EKG machines to ensure they actually work as advertized. Also, this one is apparently capable of using electromyogram electrodes, which may be intramuscular (needles implanted into the muscles) and not just those attached to the skin.
Not a sentence!