New Bionic Arms Are Strong, Sensitive, Human-Friendly

Robotics and prosthetics designers have been making great advances in the power, sensitivity and humanity of their creations.

Case in point: The i-Limb Pulse is a new bionic arm that allows users to handle heavy objects or delicate items, as well as customize the grips to fit their needs.

With a design similar to Darth Vader?s bionic hand, this is one tough prosthetic device.

The maker, Touch Bionics, claims this prosthetic hand can handle more than 200 pounds, if your biceps are up to it. When grabbing an object, it can apply additional force by using a pulsing effect.

“This effect is generated by sending rapid, high-frequency electronic pulses to the finger motors, driving them to close more securely around an object,” the company explains on its website.

The i-Limb Pulse is customizable with software. Doctors and users can tweak i-Limb Pulse?s behavior, programming it with specific grip patterns to fit the customer’s needs. They then beam the new patterns to the hand with Bluetooth.

It comes in two sizes, to accommodate both genders. But a number of details have not been disclosed, including the price and artificial-skin options, which were available for the previous model.

Which, by the way, wasn?t exactly shabby. The I-Limb Hand was the first fully-functional artificial hand commercially available to people who needed a hand, according to Touch Bionics. Time magazine named it one of top 50 inventions of 2008 (to be fair, that list also included Dimitrij Ovtcharov?s new ping-pong serve).

According to Touch Bionics, i-Limb Hand has been fitted to more than 1,200 patients.

We’re not sure the same amount of commercial success will follow another interesting robotic arm concept that hit us in the past few days: an arm modeled after an elephant’s trunk.

Although its name includes the word “bionic,” the Bionic Handling Assistant is more of an industrial-level robotics device — and still not available for sale — but the makers, Festo, say it will offer a safe and flexible way to move stuff around.

Because contact between humans and current industrial robots can be hazardous, BHA?s human-friendly trunk retracts on contact (or so the company claims). As such, it would be a safer way to transfer things in hospitals or at home.

The idea of a robotic arm that looks like a trunk so it doesn’t violently murder you might sound silly. But a recent study by three German scientists showed that robotic arms could, in fact, violently murder you.

(Photo: Touch Bionics)