Luke: The amazing prosthetic arm from Dean Kamen (video)

Submitted by GlimmerGuy on 09/20/2009 – 9:00 pmAdd comment

Luke arm in action It was great to see Dean Kamen‘s design work on prosthetics on "60 Minutes" recently.

Kamen is the well known inventor of the Segway, and is one of the featured designers in Glimmer. In my interviews with him, he talked about the way that innovative designers wrestle with uncertainty. “You roll around in bed at night, thinking ‘Am I trying to do something that’s impossible?’ ”

All that tossing of sheets notwithstanding, Kamen, like a lot of innovative designers, has an unshakeable belief that he can alter reality, even in areas where he has no particular expertise. He didn’t know anything much about prosthetics until quite recently, when he looked up from his desk one day to see several high-ranking military officers marching directly toward him. At the time, in early 2007, the U.S. military was attempting to deal with some of the fallout from a poorly-designed project known as the Iraq War, which was sending home scores of young people with missing arms. The military men wanted Kamen to create a replacement arm with unprecedented mind-hand coordination. Kamen knew enough about engineering to know that what they were asking couldn’t be done. “I said to them, you guys are crazy.”

But here is the interesting thing: While Kamen was saying no, the whole time he was thinking, “ ‘Well, why not?’ I figured I could get partway there.”

About a year after Kamen’s meeting with the generals, there was the arm in Kamen’s studio, attached to a life-size replica mannequin of the Terminator. The arm had already been tested by an amputee at a live demonstration before top government and military officials in Washington—and yes, it could indeed pick up a grape, or an egg, or a coin off the tabletop. And, as I discovered firsthand when I visited Kamen’s workshop, it could also give you one hell of handshake.