Bionic Arm — good science
Today the staff of SFRevu, TechRevu, and Gumshoe Review got together for our monthly meeting. Along with catching up on each other and kibitzing about possible changes to our sites and discussion of ways to make our zines better for our readers, we take some time to get to know each other better and to have some fun. So, we have a meeting followed by food, whatever movie that got the highest vote, and then share our best website of the month. Well, one person’s best website was TED: Ideas worth Spreading.
I’d been to the site before to listen and watch a talk or two. If you haven’t been there and you enjoy learning about new things or getting a hit to the side of the head to jump you out of your regular thought processes — it’s a great site with some thoughtfully presented ideas. The talk we listened to was by Dean Kamen about how he came to work on the bionic arm. Normally, I’d embed the video but this one is long and I thought it would be better if you went to the site — besides, you’re probably going to want to poke around over there anyway and bookmark it for later visits.
If you’ve been reading my site regularly, you’ll know that I’ve had a couple of rants about how technology in the US has been falling behind. Well, Dean Kamen has raised my hopes. This arm was done in 13 months from the start of the project. Evidently, with a committed and eager group working on a project they believe in — work can be done and done well. This is now up for funding from what I’ve read elsewhere and I’m hoping it gets more funding for trials and then some fine tuning. This is so much better for people missing an arm or even two arms than a stick with a hook or a plastic and wood approximation of an arm but without movement.
Evidently, the spirit to invent when matched with the right task and the right people shows that we can still do some pretty amazing things. I just hope this gets down to the people who actually needs these arms.