"World's Most Advanced"

First, watch this video. It's only 3 minutes long. Back? Okay let's get started.

First, that thing looks awesome. Independently articulating fingers, carbon fiber shell, neat whirring noise as it articulates, battery integrated into design and not externally worn...everything about it looks sweet. Even the carbon black color gives it an almost sinister, technological appearance.

But.

I watched that video and waited for the magic moment when I'd be impressed. Like, I kept hoping the hand would crush a can of soup or an orange, or he'd start playing Moonlight Sonata, or cop a feel on his wife, or even the individual fingers would wave at the camera. That magic moment never happened.
But I had expected it to. Because when someone calls a device "the world's most advanced" I have a level of expectation of being excited by what I'm about to witness. If someone posted a video of "the world's most advanced car" I don't want to see a humdrum Honda Civic - but with a new stereo!

I've written many times before on TAE about the various difficulties in producing a practical, functional upper extremity prosthetic (or exoskeleton for that matter). The human hand has more than a dozen muscles controlling it, all perfectly aranged inside the forearm where all the wrist muscles hide as well. Each muscle has been carefully evolved to give humans a unique, high speed, high control, high endurance system for moving their fingers. A perfect example is that I am blazing away at almost 100 words per minute on this blog post, making few errors, not watching my fingers, and my arm muscles show no signs of fatigue. Concert pianists play Rachmaninoff. Mechanics change alternators.
Honestly, the brilliance of human anatomy is typified in our hands, and the wide breadth of motions we can produce with them.

This beBionic arm is great, for many reasons. But I was disappointed. An amputee, forces to dress with one arm, forced to hold his kids with one arm, forced to zip his fly with one hand...he probably finds this technology wonderful, and the happiness of the man featured in the video is evident.
But as I watched that guy have to use his "good" arm to click his prosthetic into a different mode, and I watch the prosthetic slowly whirr into a different grip, I felt frustration.

I felt frustration because we can do better.

There will come a day when a person is in a serious car accident. Unconscious, they are rushed to the hospital and their shattered arm is amputated. A simple procedure will mount a socket on their new stump, and microscopic electrodes will detect the nerve endings and interface with them. A prosthetic arm will be attached to the socket. After several hours, the patient will awaken and their new prosthetic arm will function exactly like their other biological one. There will be no training or rehab or calibration necessary. Like trading in an iPhone 4 for an iPhone 4s.
Then there will come a day when we will attend concerts where pianists will have willingly traded out their biological arms for prosthetic ones because it allows them to play faster, longer, better. Larger prosthetic hands will give them a greater range on the keyboard.
And there will come a day when prosthetic hands look and feel just like real ones. We'll know friends for years and never realize they were an amputee. Then one day they'll disconnect their arm and it'll scare us senseless and then we'll laugh about it. It'll be a party gag.

Every day there are more engineers. Every day we get more advanced technology to play with. And in the years to come a thousand prosthetic arms will be produced, each a little more advanced than the last. Each smarter. Each more real. It's naive to pretend that we can go from point A to point B without the long journey in between. But its okay to be impatient too.


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