This Specially Designed Robotic Arm will Someday Revolutionize Healthcare

Article written by Sci-Tech Expert, everything gadgets and technology

Those with debilitating injuries may have new hope in the coming future.

The impact that technology has had on the medical industry is staggering. We’re closer than ever to curing life-threatening diseases and treating symptoms faster than ever before. We can diagnose with greater precision, and we’re beginning to experiment with the interaction between human flesh and machine.

One potential application for this bond is to heal those with debilitating handicaps that leave them unable to perform basic tasks for themselves. This could see widespread adoption in the military, where wartime injuries can result in missing limbs.

That reality was recently made a lot more manageable for retired Staff Sergeant James Sides. The retired veteran suffered the loss of his right hand, and blindness in one eye, when an IED he was attempting to diffuse exploded very close to him.

Today, with the help of Rogers & Cowan, the Alfred Mann Foundation is giving James Sides a chance at a return to normalcy. Sides was fitted with a prosthetic arm that can move on his will. Outsiders might think this is some kind of sophisticated mind control, but the reality is that the device reads the motions of Sides’ arm muscles and outputs that data as motions of the fingers or thumb.

The device even has sensors that stop it from clamping down too hard on something, in case Sides needs to pick up a fragile object or shake someone’s hand. This new device is only seeing a small test case for this deployment, but the hope of the Alfred Mann Foundation, and Steve Doctrow of Rogers & Cowan, is that they will one day have the ability to offer these devices to all who need them.