您查看的文章来源于http://www.oklinux.cn Like most good open-source developers, Iraq war veteran Jonathan Kuniholm started off scratching his own itch.
Kuniholm was a graduate student in biomedical engineering at Duke University, and the cofounder of a small industrial design firm, when his Marine reserve unit was called up for service. He was shipped off to western Iraq, where, a few months into his tour, he fell victim to an IED -- blown down while on foot patrol near Haditha Dam.
The man beside him was fatally injured. Kuniholm sat up. "The first thing I noticed was that my arm was pretty seriously injured, my hand was mostly severed.... And then I noticed that my rifle was broken in half."
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After escaping an ambush with the help of his companions, Kuniholm was taken back to America. Following months of surgery and rehabilitation, he found himself at Walter Reed being fitted for his first prosthetic arm -- a myoelectric limb that looked and felt like a smooth plastic doll's hand.
He was not impressed. The design was relatively advanced for a prosthetic, and represented a cosmetic improvement over the traditional hook design. But it was slow to operate, and not strong enough to hold a fork or open a door. Handling a soldering iron would be out of the question.
But as a dismayed Kuniholm recovered in the hospital, his engineering colleagues at Tackle Design in Durham, North Carolina were already exploring his options.
Kuniholm founded Tackle -- an industrial design skunkworks -- with several fellow students in 2003. Now his partners were determined to find the best technology to replace his lost limb. What they found was this: The best simply wasn't very good. "We were very disappointed with what was out there," says Tackle partner Jesse Crossen.
The majority of people using upper limb prosthetics still use a basic hook design that hasn't seen much progress since 1912. And the so-called "state of the art" upper limb prosthetics, while cosmetically advanced, are still based on 50-year-old technology, and are barely useful.
The prosthetics are activated by muscle signals read from the skin surface of the remaining limb, but offer few actions, have little strength, and require a battery. They are often slow to respond. As a result, very few amputees use them for very long, and half of those with upper limb loss use nothing at all, estimates Kuniholm.
When Kuniholm got out of the hospital, he and his partners decided they'd have to improve the state of the art themselves. "We knew that for years to come we'd be working on prosthetics," says partner Chuck Messer. The next question was, what would they do with the resulting intellectual property?
"We realized if we don't open our designs up they are going to languish on Jon's arm," says Crossen.
And with that, the first open-source prosthetics community was born.
Founded last year, the nonprofit Open Prosthetics Project applies the ethical and intellectual property foundation of open-source software to the task of building better artificial limbs. The project releases its experimental designs to its website in the public domain, free for anyone to use, forever. Anyone can download the STL files, tinker with them in CAD software, and submit them to a rapid manufacturer, such as a prototyping 3-D printing company.
This lets anyone turn out a customized prosthetic device without incurring tens of thousands of dollars in production costs. A user with a few hundred dollars to spend can be holding the physical reality within a week, though the post processing would still require some expertise.
"You have to drill screw holes and tap the threads yourself before a prosthetic would be usable," says Kuniholm.
So far, the project has produced a handful of useful homebrew prosthetic hacks, and is closing in on a solution that would dramatically improve the functionality of the common hook device.
The standard hook today comes in two basic types. In one, the metal hook is closed normally, and you shrug your shoulder to open it, maintaining the shrug as long as you want it open. The other type is normally open, and you shrug to hold it closed.
Open Prosthetics' experimental design incorporates both modes in one hook, using a pin/spring/cam set-up controlled by the intensity of the wearer's shrug: A limited shrug momentarily opens or closes the hook, just like the traditional design, while a full shrug acts as a toggle, reversing the hook from open to closed, or visa versa, and leaving it there until the next actuation.
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