Team Wins Award for Proto 2 Work

The Revolutionizing Prosthetics (RP) 2009 team--an international collaboration led by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland--was honored with a Popular Mechanics Breakthrough Award for its work on Proto 2, a highly advanced prosthetic arm.

The awards, handed out at a ceremony on Oct. 10 at Hearst Tower in New York, New York, recognize innovators who improve lives and expand possibilities in the realms of science, technology, engineering, and exploration, according to Popular Mechanics .

" Popular Mechanics is devoted to recognizing innovations that re-imagine the role that technology and science play in our lives," said James Meigs, editor-in-chief of Popular Mechanics . "All of this year's Breakthrough Award winners do just that--and demonstrate how new discoveries and inventions can actually make the world a better place."

Earlier in 2007, the RP 2009 team, which is funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), completed work on Proto 1, the first fully integrated prosthetic arm that can be controlled naturally and provide sensory feedback. The arm also allows for seven different kinds of movement--a level of control far beyond the current state of the art for prosthetic limbs.

The Proto 2 limb system, unveiled and demonstrated in August at the DARPA Tech 2007 conference in Anaheim, California, boosts the degrees of movement to 27, and has the strength and speed of movement approaching the capabilities of the human limb, combined with more than 80 individual sensory elements for feedback of touch, temperature, and limb position.

"It's an honor to be associated with the RP 2009 team," said APL's Stuart Harshbarger, the team's project manager. "Across the board, the team continues to pull out all of the stops to meet highly aggressive milestones and exceed expectations."

In addition to the Popular Mechanics Breakthrough award, the RP 2009 team was a finalist for the DARPA Tech 2007 Director's Award for Significant Technical Achievement. "APL and DARPA are united in the mission to improve technology and quality of lifefor our injured warfighters," Harshbarger says. "A lot of people are working very hard to accomplish DARPA's vision of a system that approaches the natural appearance and control of the native limb. It remains a significant challenge, but our progress should give hope that the performance of the final RP 2009 limb will significantly improve the capabilities of upper-extremity prosthetic limbs."

A complete report of the Breakthrough Awards is published in the November 2007 issue of Popular Mechanics .

For more information about Proto 2 visit: www.oandp.com/edge/issues/articles/2007-11_02.asp

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