Prosthetic Arm Clearinghouse Encourages Innovation–Innovation in prosthetic arm design has been slow, largely because the market for prosthetic arms is small and the development costs are high, due to the complex functions of the hand and arm.  But Jonathan Kuniholm, a marine reservist who lost his arm when his platoon was ambushed and an IED exploded outside of Baghdad on New Year’s Day 2005, is trying to get innovators to collaborate online to make better prosthetic arms for amputees.

Jonathan, a PhD student in Biomedical Engineering at Duke University, founded the Open Prosthetic Project (OPP) to encourage engineers, designers and innovators to share their ideas and designs with others.  The OPP acts as a clearinghouse of ideas–contributors are invited to join an ongoing discussion about prosthetic arm design, and to give and take ideas to and from the site.  Nothing is proprietary, and the hope is that this process will encourage design improvements that will benefit upper limb amputees across the country and the world.

Click here to see the full “Scientific American” article.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 27th, 2009 at 11:34 am and is filed under amputees, Arms, device design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.