Prosthetic Limbs : Past, Present, and Future Essay

Prosthesis is a term used for replacing a human body part which has been damaged or cut accidently with an artificial one. Hybrid prosthetic limb is a combination of mechanical and electrical circuit in which a controller gives command to electrically driven motor for the gripper opening and closing. Signal for the gripper opening or closing is acquired from the other shoulder movement. A strap on the shoulder is tied to a string which switches on or off the limit switch to give a trigger signal. This trigger signal actuates the motor in the gripper to perform open or close operation.

Many veterans are missing major limbs, and are very handicapped making work and everyday life a huge struggle. There are prosthetic legs and arms that can be used, but they often take a long time to learn, and are very costly. In a recent interview with NBC News, a veteran by the name of Mike Kacer explains how the government spent $117,000 providing him with prosthetic arms over the last five years, and he doesn’t even like to use them. "I could actually tie the shoe faster without the prosthesis," Kacer says, and he’s not the only one that feels this way. Many other veterans using these prosthetic limbs eventually abandon them due to painful, unreliable and hard to use reasons. “Of the roughly 1,600 veterans who have suffered major limb losses from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, about 319 have faced amputations of some part of their arms.” (NBC News). Not only is that a lot of money spent on prosthetics that are hard to use, painful, and eventually abandoned, arms rather than legs are a lot harder to use according to research by Gary Berke, a Stanford University instructor who operates a private clinic providing prosthetics. "Walking is relatively straightforward," Berke said. Artificial legs essentially can do everything that real ones do. Artificial arms, however, are not nearly as adept as the real ones. "We're behind the eight ball in terms of

For some amputees, there may be a physical and emotional pain with the lost of a limb. Bionics may not look and feel like a biological limb, but it comes close in providing the functions and fills the blank space of a missing limb. Providing individuals with bionic prosthetic technology assists in the reduction of health care cost by enabling an individual to maintain an appropriate activity level. Bionic limbs “enables people to return to work and other important daily activities faster and easier than before” ( Hixenbaugh, 2010, p. 721). With the use of bionics an amputee can walk with a natural gait and reduce the occurrence of stress on other joints ( Hixenbaugh, 2010, p. 725). This alleviates the chance of chronic or acute pain. An amputee can achieve a close to normal or normal metabolic energy exertion and reduced the amount of energy exerted from the amputee ( Hixenbaugh, 2010, p. 725). This may give the wearer the ability to withstand longer minor physical activities, such as walking for longer periods of time. Individals that wear BioM walk at 23% faster than the speed of wearing a traditional prosthetic ( Hixenbaugh, 2010, p. 725). This gives an amputee to walk at a natural speed. Through the use of external input bionics use, amputees gain the ability to safely walk on different terrains and stairs. Overall bionic prosthetics improve quality of life for amputee veterans as well as other individuals with

There are over two million amputees in the United States. An amputee is someone who lost or had a limb surgically removed. This can also be caused by birt defects and injuries. The first fake limb was created and used in the Middle Ages. Fake limbs have come a long way since the Middle Ages. The artificial limbs that are going are going to be talked about in this essay are legs, arms, and feet. There are many more artificial limbs though

An example that enables one to best understand this sensory system is one showing what happens if this sensory system is no longer there. Ian Waterman lost his sixth sense along with the ability to feel light touch when a virus killed the necessary nerves. The man still had all the nerves to control muscle movement but had no feedback from the outside world about where his limbs were except that obtained by sight. A normal person is able to move a finger, knowing where and what the finger is doing, with little effort. The normal person could just volunteer the finger to move back and forth and proprioception would make this an easy task. Without proprioception, the brain cannot feel what the finger is doing, and the process must be carried out in more conscious and calculated steps. The person must use vision to compensate for the lost feedback on the progress of the finger. Then the I-function must voluntarily and consciously tell the finger what to do while watching the feedback (3).

Many disabled people today live in a world where they are seen as incapable of completing normal daily tasks. Life is a struggle however they can’t do anything else but to carry on. The future of bionic body parts could indefinitely enhance a disabled person’s life. It would allow for them to be more mobile/active, and within that, gain many health benefits to securing a longer and healthier life. At a conference session discussing the future of robotic, a speaker called Harding showed his exoskeleton work in progress. It allowed a paraplegic man to simply stand up and walk with a little bit of aid. In future, products like this could allow paraplegics to get up and walk completely by themselves. This would have a positive impact on physical and mental health (Gibbs, 2015). A future product like this will benefit a diverse group of injured people, whether it’s military injuries or car accident injuries. At this present time, society faces a major problem with organ donations. More people are on an organ transplant list than what is going around, and every year lots of those people die before they get a transplant. Our future body parts made with advanced technology such as computer-aided jet-based 3D tissue engineering would solve this problem. Less people would be dying and more would be living longer. With these positive aspects does come some negative

Prosthetic limbs have been around for centuries, but what is one thing they all have in common? They have all been a nuisance. In recent years technology of the modern day Prosthesis has ventured to new heights, but they have not perfected an artificial limb yet. With the amount of people in need of prosthetic limbs, the demand for a perfect prosthesis is tremendous. The perfect prosthesis shouldn’t feel or even look like an artificial limb. Prosthetics should go unnoticed throughout the rest of the amputee’s life.

Although a perfect prosthetic is yet to be created, the technology has still come a long way. These limbs can now respond to changing terrain and controls pressure applied in “a piece of high-tech hardware” explained as “a computerized, hydraulic [system] that monitors and adjusts every step, with a response time in milliseconds” which is useful to any amputee who wishes to step outside their house (1). As technology advances to adjust prosthetics to the appropriate terrain and speed, amputees become more mobile and more free to travel on a wider scale and not be constricted by a rusty piece of metal that cannot handle certain situations such as a hike or jog. The time it takes for amputees to get back on their feet has decreased due to the new prosthetics being produced, making it easier for amputees to return to life with renewed confidence and a spring in their step (literally). But not everyone that needs prosthetics have lost a limb; some have lost a

The DynamicArm is a unique prosthetic in that it allows for dynamic arm swing during gait. With a prosthetic that does not freely swing like a typical arm, it takes

Multiple research teams have long worked on restoring touch to people with prosthetic limbs. So far the researchers at Stanford University were able to send signals to the brain tissue of mice, which closely mimicked the nerve messages of touch sensors in human skin, by creating electronic sensors. Another breakthrough happen two years ago, when researchers at Case Western Reaserch University in Cleveland, Ohio, gave people with prosthetic hands a sense of touch by wiring by wiring pressure sensors on the hands to perpheral nerves in their arms. Although, a rudimentary sense of touch has been restored with

After the surgery, individuals with TMR were able to successfully activate and control 10 different types of elbow, wrist, and hand motions at a high skill level with the virtual prosthetic. In comparison to those controls who did not have an amputation, the TMR patients had an average rate that was 6% lower in successfully performing virtual arm prosthetic motions with an 8% decrease in the elbow and 4% decrease in the wrist and hand1. This data was collected through the use of EMG electrodes placed over the reinnervated muscles of the TMR patients and over the corresponding muscles of the control, non-amputee participants1. With the TMR patients being able to use the virtual arm prosthetic, the future of motorized prostheses seems to be very high, as this data shows that nerve signals are able to be relayed successfully post TMR surgery, despite the complete severing of neural connections to the arm during amputation. Not only were all five individuals with amputations able to use the virtual arm prosthetic, but three out of the five amputee participants were even able to control advanced, motorized prosthetics using the reinnervated

Problems with blood circulation, injuries from traffic collusion to military combat, cancer, and birth defects are all reasons why someone may lose a limb. Typically, after a person loses a limb they lose mobility and they can’t do many things by themselves. According the amputee coalition 95 percent of all amputees have a prosthesis. Out of the 95 percent ten percent of them say they do not wear it on a constant basis, 75 percent of them indicated that it was easier to do daily task without the device. What are these devices? There are two main subsets of prosthesis including prosthesis that replaces the limb and then there is cosmesis prosthesis that are just for cosmetic that do not have any function. The main idea of a prosthetic is that

By the late 1500 century, a French Army barber/surgeon Ambroise Paré was to be considered the father of prosthesis surgery. He was one of the best when it came to saving enough limb to allow for a prosthetic limb. By this time the advancement in these fake limbs had grown from crude made hands to fully functioning legs. ‘As the U. S. Civil War dragged on, the number of amputations rose astronomically, forcing Americans to enter the field of prosthetics. james Hanger, one of the first amputees of the Civil War, developed what he later patented as the “Hanger Limb” from whittled barrel

Powered prosthetics have just came out, this product allows disabled/paralyzed people to walk or “have the sensation of walking”.

brought some injury survivors to this world. Since the limbs is an important organ in human life