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The newspaper of The Johns Hopkins University October 22, 2007 | Vol. 37 No. 8
 
APL-led Team's Prosthetic Arm Honored by 'Popular Mechanics'

The Revolutionizing Prosthetics 2009 team — an international collaboration led by Johns Hopkins' Applied Physics Laboratory — was honored with a Popular Mechanics Breakthrough Award at a ceremony held Oct. 10 at the Hearst Tower in New York. The awards recognize innovators who improve lives and expand possibilities in the realms of science, technology, engineering and exploration.

"Popular Mechanics is devoted to recognizing innovations that re-imagine the role that technology and science play in our lives," said James Meigs, the magazine's editor in chief. "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 this year, the RP 2009 team, which is funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, 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 eight 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 in August at the DARPA Tech 2007 conference in Anaheim, Calif., boosts that number to 25, 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.

A complete report on the Breakthrough Awards appears in the November issue of Popular Mechanics, on newsstands now.

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