RSLSteeper, a British company, has announced that they will launch a prosthetic hand in May 2010. The Bebionic is yet another prosthetic hand with, if the picture they have on their website is from the actual hand, a very nice cosmetic look to it. Other than that I’d say it’s comparable to what we have been seeing elsewhere these past couple of years 
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Don’t take me wrong. I love that we have so many advanced prosthetic hands to choose from these days. There is the I-Limb and of course the hyper-publicized ‘Luke arm’ from Dean Karman and his group of researchers at DEKA. And of course there is the SmartHand which if you take a look at the video is pretty cool, different European universities and researchers came together to work on this one.
These are all very nice. All with as many degrees of freedom as needed (in the 20-ish range), all with very nice controls taking advantage of the phantom limb of the patient, either with reinnervation or myoelectric signaling. But what none of them still has solved is a good way to include feedback. In order to do most of the things we do we need our tactile sense.
The problem to adding tactile sensing to one of these limbs is not the sensors themselves, that’s pretty much a solved problem, and most of them already have some sort of sensing mechanism. The tricky thing is to deliver that information back to the patient with no loss of information. Tactile interfaces in contact with the skin just will not have enough bandwidth to deal with all that information. The ideal situation would be to have some sort of neural interface, either through peripheral nerve stimulation or straight to the target through a cortical implant.
I will not venture to say how close are we to see something like that, although I am always an optimist. I am pretty sure the SmartHand group is already working on it and I am pretty sure the guys at APL working in the biggest project of them all are also working on it. How close are they to achieve it? We will see… pretty soon, I hope.
If you are interested in prosthetics and are wondering how to contribute you can check out the open prosthetics project, an open source based project to build a prosthetic limb. I don’t know what’s their status right now, but it was a living project back in early 2009.
