The Applied Physics
Laboratory has been awarded a $30.4 million contract to
start the first phase of Revolutionizing Prosthetics 2009,
a four-year program that aims to develop a next-generation
mechanical arm that mimics the properties and sensory
perception of the real thing.
The contract was awarded under the Defense Advanced
Research Projects Agency Revolutionizing Prosthetics
Program, an ambitious effort to provide the most advanced
medical and rehabilitative technologies for military
personnel injured in the line of duty. APL's Stuart D.
Harshbarger, along with a core group of Johns Hopkins
engineers, scientists and medical professionals from APL,
the
School of Medicine, the
Whiting School of
Engineering and the
Bloomberg School of Public Health, will lead an
interdisciplinary team of government agencies, universities
and private firms to implement DARPA's vision.
Although there have been significant improvements in
upper extremity prosthetics in recent years — the
state-of-the-art myoelectric arm, for example, allows users
to control hand and arm movements by deliberately flexing a
muscle or through mechanical movement — "these
devices have relatively limited degrees of motion and can
generally allow control of only one motion at a time,"
Harshbarger said.
The APL-led team's research will focus mainly on
advanced neural control strategies that will allow the user
to operate the arm in a near-biological manner — that
is, to feel and manipulate objects as that person would
with a real hand. The team also aims to develop new power,
actuation and control technologies, as well as advanced
sensors. "The resulting prosthetic system will provide a
significantly improved quality of life over a range of
daily living and job functions, including the dexterous
manipulation of objects," Harshbarger said.
"Our challenge is to advance the base of scientific
understanding related to neural control mechanisms and
physiological function of the human limb, while at the same
time developing innovative engineering solutions that can
be successfully implemented," he said. "DARPA wants this
technology ready for clinical trials in only four years, so
there is no time for us to re-create the wheel. We have
handpicked a team that has decades of experience in
prosthetics but more importantly has made recent advances
that are ready to be realized."
A critical aspect of the program will be patient
outreach, making sure the team creates a limb that patients
will accept and use. Ross E. Andersen, an associate
professor of medicine at the School of Medicine and
co-investigator on the project, will coordinate this
effort.
"We will be working with the patient care community,
including the amputee program at the U.S. Army Walter Reed
Medical Center and with investigators at the [Johns
Hopkins] School of Public Health and the National
Rehabilitation Hospital to determine patient needs and
develop measures of effectiveness in terms of cognitive
loading during prosthetic use, functional performance and
patient acceptance at each step as we move forward,"
Andersen said. "This is a critical aspect of the program
and ultimately demonstrates the importance of collaboration
between the medical and scientific communities."
Ultimately, the main goal of DARPA's Revolutionizing
Prosthetics program is to restore to the wounded war
fighter the range of choices that would have been available
prior to the injury, said DARPA's Col. Geoffrey Ling, the
program manager for the Revolutionizing Prosthetics
programs. "Although our war fighters suffer fewer
fatalities, they still endure horrible injuries, and today
one of the most devastating battlefield injuries is loss of
a limb," he said. "DARPA's vision is a future where a
soldier who has lost an extremity in battle will regain
full use of that limb. We will do whatever is necessary to
restore these people who have given up so much for the idea
of freedom and in service to their country."
The diverse APL team brings together some of the most
respected scientific researchers in their fields and
commercial leaders from the prosthetics industry, including
investigators from Arizona State, Johns Hopkins, Umea
(Sweden) and Vanderbilt universities; BioSTAR Group;
California Institute of Technology; National Rehabilitation
Hospital; New World Associates; Northwestern University and
the Northwestern University Prosthetics Research
Laboratory; Oak Ridge National Laboratories; Otto Bock
Health Care, Austria; Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago;
and the universities of Michigan, Rochester, California at
Irvine, Southern California and Utah.
Second-tier subcontractors and other collaborators
include Chicago P/T; the Fraunhoffer Institutes for
Biomedical Technology and Reliability & Microintegration,
Germany; FLEXSYS; Harvey Mudd College; Martin Bionics;
Punch Communications; Ripple; Scott Sabolich Prosthetics
and Research; the Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna, Italy;
Sigenics of Lincolnwood; and the University of New
Brunswick, Canada.
Dexter G. Smith, APL's Business Area executive for
biomedicine, said, "Developing this broad consortium and
providing both the technical and managerial leadership for
the design and systems integration of this advanced limb is
an example of what APL does best. We focus on programs
where we can make critical contributions to our nation's
critical challenges," he said. "I can think of no better
example of a critical contribution than having a positive
impact on the quality of life and future opportunities for
our injured soldiers."