The Future is Prosthetic

To date, there have been 11,523 reported victims of anti-personnel landmines in Colombia. These devices not only kill the victim, but in many cases of survival the victim is severely injured, with physical and emotional trauma. New prosthetic technology can give amputees a second chance, with the advantage of being better than they were before their injuries.

In a not very distant future, looking at your arm and seeing a robotic limb will be something to be envied and not discriminated against. The technological advancements in the field of prosthetics and neuroprosthetics in the last decade  have allowed us humans to understand how, in 20 or 30 years, a robotic element integrated to our bodies might make us more capable than our biologic limbs do today.

Research laboratories like the Johns Hopkins’ Applied Physics Lab are working right now in new breakthrough technology, Targeted Muscle Reinnervation, that gives sense of touch to handicapped patients. This technology is revolutionary, and sounds like something outside of a science fiction movie. This advancement allows the Modular prosthetic limb, MPL, to give sensory feedback to the wearer. The MPL is controlled by the patient’s mind giving it a vast advantage over regular, and perhaps antiquated prosthetics.

The Hippocratic Oath sets doctors  in an ethical limbo when performing surgical procedures to instal prosthetic limbs as an enhancement. This moral issue creates a set back for the further advancement and implementation of this new technology. This new technology will be able to not only enhance regular peoples biological abilities, but allow victims of internal conflict to have a better limb than before and re-construct their life around and self esteem.

The breakthrough technology and research being implemented in this new generation of prosthetics is defining a very clear future where is not that crazy to have a body part amputated to be enhanced in a specific field. As Andres Torres, EIA professor of Biomedical Engineering explained; the technology, development cost and ethics are the only limitations of having prosthetics amplifying human abilities; in a near future, he expects to see prosthetics behaving better that the original organic limb although recognizes that there’s a limit to technology and that it might not be able to resolve everything.

The complexity and inminet beauty of the human body makes it virtually impossible to have a fully biomechanical model built to surpass its abilities, but specific cases of patients have shown that the limits can be pushed. Athletes with lower limb prosthetics are able to run significantly faster than sprinters like usain bolt showing that the human capabilities can be surpassed and in a relatively short time greatly diminished by the performance of robotic and neural-prosthetic limbs.