Necessity is the mother of invention. With the nature of the combat in Iraq and Afghanistan, and advances in battlefield medicine, many soldiers survive limb-destroying events that would have previously been fatal. As such Tribune Media’s Nancy Shute examines the huge market for prosthetics of active, motivated young people…
James Stuck says his newest right foot is “pretty cool”; it can sense when he’s headed downstairs or climbing up a slope and angle itself accordingly. A great choice for hiking. But when the 22-year-old Army specialist from New Kensington, Pa., wants to play soccer, this foot’s “not quick enough to keep up.” For that, he pulls on one of the five others in his arsenal.
Stuck lost his right leg below the knee last December, when his armored Humvee hit an explosive device near Kirkuk, Iraq. At that moment, he joined a group of wounded soldiers unique in the history of battlefield medicine.
Improved body armor and speedy emergency care have reduced the death rate among Americans wounded in Afghanistan and Iraq to a historic low, but the amputation rate is up by 100 percent. The result: an unprecedented wave of research on prosthetics, aimed at bringing a primitive technology into the 21st century.
Until Iraq, companies had little incentive to develop high-performance prosthetics, because most of the country’s approximately 1 million people missing a limb are older and often frail victims of diabetes or vascular disease. But Stuck and his comrades are young, athletic, and impatient — and have no intention of quietly retiring on disability.
“Our soldiers have really inspired the research community to apply the science to help,” says Lt. Col. Paul Pasquina, medical director of the amputee program at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C. Much of the new research is being funded by the U.S. Defense Department — including a $48.5 million program that aims to build a “thought-controlled” arm by 2009 that’s as strong and agile as Luke Skywalker’s in Star Wars.
An interesting closing note on the article focuses on a soldier/amputee turned biomedical engineering grad student…
Soldiers who lose an arm in battle find themselves with less-appealing options. Jonathan Kuniholm, 34, who served as a Marine in Iraq and lost his right arm below the elbow 21 months ago in an explosion, finds himself very frustrated with his state-of-the-art “myoelectric” arm, which is controlled by sensors on his own arm that read muscle contractions. “The hand can open and close, and you can rotate the wrist. But you can’t do those simultaneously,” Kuniholm says. Even the simplest action — picking up a pitcher and pouring water — becomes a tedious multistep process, so he often reverts to a Captain Hook-style hook.
Now a biomedical engineering graduate student at Duke University, Kuniholm, of Durham, N.C., is well aware of existing technologies in robotics and control systems that could be assembled into “something much more useful than what we have now.”
Talk about a reason to finish your thesis…
More from the Dallas-Fortworth Star Telegram …
Flashbacks: Limb Regeneration: Not Just for X-Men Anymore; Utah Electrode Array to Control Bionic Arm; New Upper Extremity Prosthetics Don’t Cut It; DARPA Encourages a Prosthetic Revolution