HEALING [CONTINUED FROM PAGE 77]
Artificial hands now can regulate grip and prehension based on signals received from the muscles in the wearer’s arm. This allows wounded warriors to do everything from picking up an egg to holding a tennis racket, says Fergason.
Another exciting upper-limb advancement is targeted muscle reinnervation. This technique reassigns nerves that once controlled a patient’s lost arm and hand to his or her pectoral muscles, allowing the patient to control his or her prosthetic device through muscle contractions read by a surface sensor.
Then there’s the concept of osseointegration, in which a prosthetic device is attached directly to an extruding metal fixture surgically embedded into a limb’s long bone. This technique eliminates the need for uncomfortable prosthetic sockets, says Fergason. Upper-extremity osseointegration has been studied widely in Europe, but the procedure has not yet received Food and Drug Administration approval in the U.S. due to skin interface and infection issues.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) Revolutionizing Prosthetics program, launched in 2006, is in the vanguard of prosthetics research. The advanced prosthetic arm systems developed for DARPA by DEKA Research and Development Corp. and the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab provide between 10 and 26 controlled degrees of motion, an anthropomorphic system that has powered shoulders, and either six user-selectable grips or a variant with a motor in each finger and multiple motors in the thumb to provide natural grips, says Dr. Geoffrey Ling, a retired Army colonel and acting deputy director of the DARPA Defense Sciences Office.
“The expanded capabilities provided by the arm systems give people hope for a better quality of life,” Ling says.
MO
— Don Vaughan, a freelance writer in North Carolina, is a frequent contributor to Military Officer and author of the Pages of History department.
JANUARY 2014 MILITARY OFFICER 81
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