Current status: Last we heard, back in February, the FDA was fast-tracking the project. That could knock years off the development cycle, but we're still an estimated four or five years away from actually using this amazing arm.

 

 

 

 

 

Back in May, a Serbian man embarked on a journey we ourselves don't have the cojones for: he cut off his own hand to have it replaced with a bionic one. To be fair, "Milo," as he's pseudonymically known, was in a terrible motorcycle accident some ten years earlier, skidding from his bike shoulder-first into a lamppost, so it wasn't exactly a cosmetic choice. After many surgeries, he regained much of the use of his arm--but not his right hand, which remained paralyzed. This year, he opted for surgery to replace his now-useless hand with a prosthesis.

Like DARPA's robotic arm, this prosthetic hand from German company Otto Bock boasts naturally-controlled movement. In this case, you don't even have to connect the nerves from the arm to the hand--it's sensitive enough to pick up signals via two sensors placed on his forearm, picking up nerve stimuli very similar to those that trigger movement in organic hands. The Otto Bock hand boasts three degrees of movement (rotation, bending/flexion, and extension) and can both pinch and perform a full-hand grip. There's always room for improvement, as this video shows, but it's a remarkably capable device.

Milo wasn't the first to volunteer to be fitted with an Otto Bock hand--the same surgeon, Austrian Dr. Oskar Aszmann, performed this surgery about a year before on a man named Patrick with a similarly dead hand, this time due to electrocution. Patrick can now tie his shoes and open bottles, which are two of my favorite activities. If it's good enough for these men, it's certainly good enough for me.

Current status: Available now.