Mediaboss Marketing

ByMichael Blanding

It's March2022 and Bradley Burkhard is sitting in an MIT lab, doing his best to follow instructions. Move your index finger, says technician Mikey Fernandez, and a finger moves dutifully up and down. What about the other digits? he asks, and other fingers curl, a bit more awkwardly. The thumb? Fernandez asks. Theres only the barest of perceptible movement. Yeah, the thumbs not really doing a whole lot, the 32-year-old Burkhard sighs, slumped back in an office chair. Hes been at this now for three days, and clearly hes getting tired.

The fact that Burkhard can move any fingers is practically a miracle. The hand he controls is not his own, but a robotic prosthesis clamped to a lab bench 3 feet away. A tangle of 16 white wires extends back to Burkhards residual arm, which ends just above the elbow. The aluminum and rubber prosthesis looks like an android arm from a science fiction movie, and indeed it is called the LUKE arm after theStar Warshero who famously lost his hand. The next-generation artificial limb, created by Segway inventor Dean Kamen and his team, allows for a finely articulated range of motion. But the real miracle isnt that arm, its Burkhards own and the first-of-its-kind surgery that allows him to control the prosthesis with finely tuned electrical signals from his residual muscles.

As Burkhards muscles flex under electrodes connected to those 16 wires, lines of computer code scroll past on a monitor. Fernandez and other scientists at theMIT Media Labwill use that output to calibrate the prosthesis to Burkhards motions, in a way they hope will eventually give him an unprecedented amount of control. Ultimately, they plan to attach the artificial limb to Burkhards own, and allow him to use it seamlessly, exactly how his arm worked before an ATV accident three years ago.

Doing amputations kind of sucks, says Dr. Matthew Carty, a reconstructive plastic surgeon at Brigham and Womens Hospital. It has been regarded for thousands of years as a failure like,I can no longer help this patient by trying to save their limb, so we just gotta cut it off.But we do ourselves and our patients a disservice by thinking about it that way. This procedure is a new way of thinking.

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He lost his arm in an accident. A new surgery and a bionic prosthetic are giving him back unprecedented control. MIT Media Lab - MIT Media Lab