Body armor is saving the lives of US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. At the same time, though, it’s leading to a whole new range of head and limb injuries in people who previously would not have survived, says Geoffrey Ling, program manager at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Upper-body injuries, in particular the loss of hands or arms, have become more common; each week in Iraq, several American troops lose a limb. To improve the lives of these young amputees, DARPA has launched a two-phase, four-year, $70 million research program to build a better prosthetic arm.
“The idea is to develop a prosthetic arm whose hand can grasp and throw a baseball, play the piano, or pick up a flower and place it in a vase as naturally as a biological arm,” says Stuart Harshbarger, a biomedical engineer at Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory outside Baltimore, Maryland....
