prosthetic

It's still no match for the human hand, but RSL Steeper's BeBionic 3 looks way cooler.

The company is launching a more powerful, durable version of its prosthetic today at a gathering of the American Orthotic Prosthetic Association (AOPA) in Boston.

The BeBionic 3 has an aluminum chassis, improved electronics, a redesigned thumb, and new motors that increase the power grip strength from 16.8 pounds to 31.5 pounds, according to SteeperUSA.

In hook mode, when a weight is carried by all fingers, the hand can bear 99 pounds, up from 70.5 pounds. … Read more

Few would have mustered the optimism or the ingenuity.

But Sun Jifa didn't have the money to buy replacements. What else was he supposed to do but build his own?

Did Sun, 51, of Guanmashan, northern China, need new seats for his car or coffee tables for his living room? Not quite.

He needed new hands, after he'd blown off his own.… Read more

Do you have a cochlear implant? An intraocular lens in your eye? A prosethetic leg with microservos? You may not realize it, but you're standing on the front line of a new age of medical augmentation, one that's raising a host of complex questions.

Who owns the expensive implant that allows you to hear or see better or the sleek thin blades that let you sprint faster? How are upgrades to your device handled? What happens to you and your device if that company goes out of business? Do the answers change if the procedure is elective rather than life-saving?

No one has easy answers, or even much beyond informed speculation -- certainly not the doctors we spoke to for this article or the medical students who addressed medical augmentation at a Defcon 20 session last month in Las Vegas. But all agree on one thing: A new frontier of medical augmentation isn't just coming sooner than you think. It's already here, as society moves from medically necessary augmentation to elective procedures. Call it human hacking. … Read more

In the future when we'll all be wearing robotic exoskeletons, we'll laugh when we think back on the days when we were mere meatsacks. German automation firm Festo is helping us upgrade with the ExoHand, a glove controller that can give people a machine handshake.

Known for its elegantly engineered SmartBird robot seagull, Festo says its ExoHand can not only teleoperate a robot hand in a master-slave control relationship, it can reduce strain from repetitive tasks when using your own old-fashioned, flesh-and-blood hands. … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--For people like Sarah Reinertsen, one of the many downsides of having a prosthetic leg is that there's never been a fashionable way to dress it up.

But for Reinertsen, a record-setting triathlete, and others including a growing number of combat veterans, a startup called Bespoke Innovations is forever changing the way they feel about themselves and how the world looks at them.

Bespoke was founded by industrial designer Scott Summit and orthopedist Kenneth Trauner. The company's initial products are what are known as fairings--3D printed prosthetic leg covers that are each one-of-a-kind and designed for and … Read more

What's an 8-foot-tall Lego man doing on the beaches of Siesta Key Village, Florida? We don't have the answer, but it's the third one that's washed ashore in the last three years--similar occurances were reported three years ago in Brighton, England, and Zandvoort, Holland; each bearing the same cryptic messaging: "NO REAL THAN YOU ARE."

Yahoo News did the dirty work and inquired about the phenomenon to Lego's assistant brand relations manager, who vehemently denied, on record, any affiliation with the stunt, eliminating the possibility of it being a viral stunt. Who knows, maybe it was printed on a 3D imaging device by the folks at MakerBot!… Read more

Fifty-year-old Brit Trevor Prideaux is an ordinary man with an extraordinary idea that could make it easier for others who are missing limbs to use smartphones--embed a phone dock right into your prosthetic.

It's worked for him.

The catering manager from Somerset, England, who was born without a left forearm, came up with the idea to integrate a smartphone into his prosthetic after using an iPhone.

In an interview with The Telegraph, Prideaux admits "...it became clear that this piece of technology was not ideally suited to be used with only one hand. When testing an iPhone, with the thoughts of purchase, I had to balance it on my prosthetic limb to text." … Read more

As scientists unveil artificial organs and prosthetics to improve the function of our hearts, kidneys, hands, and even eyes, it's easy to gloss over these devices' Achilles' heel: power.

Even building devices that run on very low power, such as pacemakers, tend to require additional invasive surgeries just to replace their batteries. Meanwhile, artificial limbs can be huge energy hogs, with the power source needing to be swapped out as frequently as every few weeks. Impractical is an understatement.

Biofuel cells could very well solve this problem. Researchers around the world are investigating how to use a body's own energy to power various devices, and one team out of France last year successfully implanted in a rat a biofuel cell that uses glucose and oxygen to generate electricity.… Read more

In the future, we'll all have cyborg bodies with replaceable parts, right? The transition to immortality, though, may take some getting used to. Touch Bionics has a handy new tool to help us practice.

The Scottish maker of the i-Limb Pulse bionic hand is showing off its new Virtu-limb, a tool it describes as "a groundbreaking simulation and training product for myoelectric upper limb prostheses." … Read more