Monday, August 27, 2007

Call to arms

By Ryan McBride

Famed New Hampshire inventor Dean Kamen has done it again. The creator of a stair-climbing wheelchair, a self-balancing wheeled transporter and other celebrated inventions has now pulled off a robotic arm with many of the capabilities of a natural limb.

The prosthetic device is being developed by Kamen's DEKA Research & Development Corp., in Manchester, N.H., under an $18.1 million contract from the Pentagon to provide better artificial limbs for U.S. soldiers who have lost their arms in recent combat.

About 18 months since the project began, several amputees have used the robotic arm to grasp bottles as well as lighter objects, such as sheets of paper -- difficult or near-impossible tasks for users of prosthetic arms now on the market.

And a Massachusetts maker of mechanical arms already has a hand in the project. Liberating Technologies Inc., a Holliston-based maker of prosthetic arms and hands, has lent technical expertise, and so have several other partners, including the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago and Northwestern University.

DARPA delighted

Kamen's firm wants to win a second contract from the U.S. Department of Defense's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to fund further development of the robotic arm and has begun talks with potential commercial partners. Yet DARPA has not committed to a second pact with the firm.

Meantime, a separate group at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore is in the middle of a four-year, $30.4 million deal from DARPA to develop a robotic arm controlled by the brain.

Col. Geoffrey Ling, who manages the programs at DARPA, said he was very pleased with Kamen's progress but could not comment on the status of any future contracts. "They've done everything we've asked them to do," Ling said, "and they've done it on time and on budget."

Hoping for no market

The 9-pound robotic arm, powered by a lithium battery, is equipped with multiple microprocessors, sensors and haptics technology. The technologies enable the device to move and function similar to a native arm and hand, said Rick Needham, who manages the project at Kamen's DEKA.

Users control the arm with sensors in their shoes and a joystick they can either move with their shoulder muscles or remaining portions of their natural arm, said Needham. The robotic arm is strong enough to curl weights of up to 20 pounds, he said, and the hands have the ability to pick up, say, a small piece of candy. They are now at work on a cosmetic cover for the robotic limb.

DEKA is in talks with potential commercial partners to market the robotic arm outside of the military arena, Needham said. He declined to provide specific information about the commercial suitors.

Needham said that winning a second contract from DARPA would provide funds to build more prototypes to test on patients in broader clinical trials needed to gain U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval.

Because the largest market for prosthetics comes from leg amputees, said DARPA's Ling, the smaller industry for artificial arms has not yielded prosthetics for upper limbs that function as well as leg replacements. His agency aims to change that for some military amputees.

A total of 651 U.S. soldiers have become amputees due to combat in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to defense officials. Ling estimated that 200 of those soldiers have lost arms or hands.

"I hope this will never be a big business," Kamen said. "(Because) I hope we will not see a lot of kids come back without limbs."