Engineers at Johns Hopkins have built a robotic prosthetic arm that has 26 joints, can curl up to 45 pounds, and is controlled just like a regular arm - with the mind. The Modular Prosthetic Limb, or MPL, is fully functional says Mike McLoughlin, title tk but needs to be at about at tenth of its current price to be viable in the marketplace. There are currently only ten MPLs, and each one costs an estimated $450,000 (TK). “We’ve designed a Maserati here, but what most people will want is a good Toyota” McLoughlin says. “The MPL was intentionally designed to be as sophisticated as we could make it so that you could really push the state of the art, but ultimately for commercializing it, it needs to be a lower cost design.” In 2006, Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Lab was awarded a $100 million DARPA grant to help wounded warriors. They worked with worked Hunter Defense Technologies to develop a prosthetic which mimics the human arm in dexterity and strength. Patients of varying disabilities have tested the arm in the lab and helped push the design forward. The resulting limb is modular, which means it can be broken off or built up to accommodate people with different needs — from a hand amputee to someone missing an entire arm. Stroke survivors or paraplegics who have lost the ability to move all or part of their bodies can also use it as a surrogate arm. Volunteer Les Baugh, AGE TK lost both arms at the shoulder after an electrical accident as a teenager. He underwent a new surgery called Targeted Muscle Reinnervation which remapped the remaining nerves from his missing arms. Engineers made a custom socket that can pick up those signals and allows him to control the arms just by thinking about the movements. TK says as the remapped nerves grow deeper, it’s possible that Mr. Baugh will have some sensation in his robotic arms. Each arm has 100 sensors and other amputees who have had the same surgery have reported being able to feel texture and temperature with the prosthetic. “The long term goal for all of this work is to have non-invasive, no extra surgeries, no extra implants, ways to control a dextrous robotic device,” says Robert Armiger, project manager for amputee research at JHAPL. In the future, researchers envision a kind of cap with sensors that an amputee or paralyzed person could wear, that would feed brain activity to the robotic arm. The lab is starting to collaborate with industry partners to explore commercial opportunities. They hope that it will be available to consumers within a few years.