Luke Prosthetic Arm Approved By FDA

Posted by Soulskill on Friday May 9, 2014 @10:37AM from the we-have-the-technology dept.

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."

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Segway by Anonymous Coward · 2014-05-09 11:59 · Score: 2, Insightful

From an engineeing standpoint, Segway is pretty cool.
From a societal one, it is a worthless consumer item.
That's where I have been having personal issues lately - all engineering jobs are for creating worthless consumer crap; like the Segway.
Now, creating artificial limbs is a worthy endeavor but I would have a real problem if the company that manufactured them was making an obscence profit. Keeping your doors open and even making a 45% operating margin is one thing and understandable, but some of these fuckers are making hundreds of percentage points just because they can - and enriching no one but the CEOs.