Service members who lost upper-body limbs are testing new prosthetic arms that could be controlled by their thought process. The prosthetics are controlled by surface electrodes, which can respond to electrical signals from the skin and convert those signals into robotic motion. The first tests were conducted last month at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Md. The Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences and the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory developed the devices jointly. Each prosthetic arm offers users a 22-degree range of motion, and dexterity that nearly matches a natural limb.
