prosthetic

Dean Kamen's “Luke arm”—a prosthesis named for the remarkably lifelike prosthetic worn by Luke Skywalker in Star Wars—came to the end of its two-year funding last month. Its fate now rests in the hands of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which funded the project.

The cutting edge headquarters of a Scottish firm behind the world's first commercially available bionic hand was officially opened today. Government ministers toured Touch Bionic's plant in Livingston and met the first recipient of the firm's pioneering i-LIMB hand. UK Minister of State for Competitiveness Stephen Timms, and Scotland Office Minister David Cairns, went on to officially open the plant.

In the George Lucas classic Star Wars, hero Luke Skywalker's arm is severed and amputated during a lightsaber fight and consequently fitted with a bionic arm that he can use as if it were his own limb. At the time the script was written, such a remedy was pure science fiction; however, the ability to manufacture bionic arms that have the functionality and even feel of a natural limb is becoming very real, with goals of launching a prototype as soon as 2009. Already, primates have been trained to feed themselves using a robotic arm merely by thinking about it, while brain sensors have been picking up their brain-signal patterns since 2003. The time has come for implementing this technology on paralyzed human patients and amputees. This article will provide a brief explanation of the technology, its current status, and the potential future it holds.

Boffins at MIT are getting ever closer to a direct mind-to-machine link that would translate a person's thoughts into instructions for a machine. The university is developing the technology so a paralysed person might be able to operate a prosthetic purely by using their mind.