Since its launch in 2005, fresh video footage from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Revolutionizing Prosthetics program has been at a premium. Much of the work performed through the program at both Johns Hopkins University (JHU), Baltimore, Maryland, and at DEKA Research and Development, Manchester, New Hampshire, has been proprietary, secret, and rarely seen.
Now, new video of the DEKA Arm System (sometimes known as the “Luke Arm”) has been released following new research on the arm described in an editorial in the Journal of Rehabilitation Research and Development (JRRD), Volume 47, Issue 3. JRRD is an official publication of Veterans Adminstration (VA) Rehabilitation Research and Development Service. In the editorial, Linda Resnik, PT, PhD, describes research currently being performed on the arm system at five sites across the United States in preparation for a new iteration of the device. The videos, which were shot at the research sites, demonstrate arm wearers undertaking everyday tasks such as clipping fingernails and reaching overhead to grasp objects.
In the research sessions, teams have been collecting data from subjects, prosthetists, and therapists in the form of standardized outcome measures, interviews, video observations, and surveys. The researchers plan to use the data to quantify users’ functional capacity, ease of performing daily activities, and prosthetic satisfaction. At its conclusion, the studies may include as many as 40 volunteers. These participants may have amputations at the transradial, transhumeral, shoulder disarticulation, or forequarter level, with either bilateral or unilateral upper-limb loss.
“The VA is currently planning for additional studies of the next generation of the DEKA Arm System when this design is finalized and available,” Resnick notes in the editorial. “My hope is that the fruits of these collaborative efforts will be a refined, highly usable, commercially available product that will improve the quality of life and functional independence of people with upper-limb amputation.”
To view the videos, visit www.rehab.research.va.gov/video/jrrdvideos.html
