The marvels of bioengineering are poised to expand their reach with a prosthetic limb whose movements are controlled by the thoughts of its user.
The Modular Prosthetic Limb (MPL) project arrives by way of a $34.5 million contract awarded by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Maryland. As Science Daily reports, the project team looks to conduct testing of the remarkable innovation in five human subjects over the next five years.
As a DARPA press release explains, it’s part of a four-year Agency mission to address the overdue need to move beyond the cable and hook prosthetics technology that dates back to the middle of the last century.
Allowing more than 20 separate degrees of motion that include the independent movements of each finger and weighing approximately the same as an actual human arm, MPL would offer nearly the same level of dexterity of an actual human arm and a degree of mechanical agility described by the design team as unprecedented.
MPL Program Manager Michael McLoughlin explains:
“We’ve developed the enabling technologies to create upper-extremity prosthetics that are more natural in appearance and use, a truly revolutionary advancement in prosthetics. Now, in Phase 3, we are ready to test it with humans to demonstrate that the system can be operated with a patient’s thoughts and that it can provide that patient with sensory feedback, restoring the sensation of touch.”
McLoughlin goes on to explain that a gathering of great minds and leading institutions are lending a hand in seeing to a successful outcome for the remarkable innovation:
“We will be working very closely with the University of Pittsburgh and the California Institute of Technology for their experience in brain computer interfaces, the University of Chicago for their expertise in sensory perception, the University of Utah for its capabilities in developing implantable devices suitable for interfacing with the human brain, and HDT Engineered Technologies for their skill in building prosthetic limb systems.”
If and when MPL is deemed a success, the device will offer new hope and restored sense of normalcy to patients with limb loss as well as those with spinal cord injury and other neurological conditions.
Photo by DARPA/JHUAPL/HDT Engineering Services.