So I totally want this to actually happen. However, they gloss over all of the actually hard parts. Cool, DEKA's built a sweet anthropomorphic robotic arm. I have no doubt that part works. But you don't just jump to running a human study from that: first, you do it in non-human primates and show that they can effective control the arm with the implant. Then you show that they can interpret feedback from the arm stimulated into their brain. Then you show that the implant is stable and immunologically accepted over a long period of time (warning: deep, hard unsolved problem). Then you show that they continuously integrate it into their body representation (not necessarily hinted by the prior control study). Then you cautiously do a human surgery and see if they can control it, and the brain doesn't reject the implant after a year. Then five patients. Then apply for FDA approval, expedited or otherwise.<p>AFAIK there's never been an implant study done using the Luke arm. Therefore we've never tried to build control models from cortical activity for it. That's a hard problem in and of itself. Jumping straight to a 5-person human study is <i>insane</i>. Furthermore, the idea that human patients are going to get intracortical feedback from the arm is crazytalk. It's just not happening. Electrical stimulation cooks the brain and causes seizures, and optical stimulation requires gene therapy (!) and has all kinds of long-term problems right now.<p>TL;DR: awesome I hope it works. They'll bring a needed device to market and solve about 10-15 of the hard problems of brain-machine interfacing for us at the same time!
> Finally, laypeople will benefit from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's (DARPA) mad scientist projects<p>Yeah, because that whole Internet thing and GPS didn't really count for much...
This looks like the DEKA arm. Here is Dean Kamen talking about it:<p><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AoY1cItRiHA" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AoY1cItRiHA</a><p>Even if it isn't the same thing, this is a pretty interesting video.
At first, I thought that it would be very cool to have such an arm, for a second entertaining the thought of someone chopping their arm off just so they could be a cyborg. However, a moment later, I thought "three arms", and immediately I saw the improvement.<p>I bet some rich guy will soon turn into some robo-Shiva.
Sigh, why does this have to come out of the military industrial machine?<p>Little known fact: over 1,000 soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan have lost a limb (out of 41,000 wounded that survived because of more advanced medicine).<p>I hope they don't use this development to justify that it's okay because we certainly don't talk about it much otherwise.