Great news!

Finally, prosthetic design gets technically inspired. I had always feared that an overly narrow focus on trying to replicate anthropomorphic shapes would be a dead end in prosthetic arm / hand design. After all, you get stared at anyway. I was always for grippers but industry devices or tentacles should be real options. Because in the end it is what makes your cumulated stress to add up to the least figure at the end of the day, and if you have not tried that with a super pimped cable controlled arm and a V2P yet, you just may be overlooking something. We’re all different and I am not saying you are. But I am saying you may.

So why not just stop trying to get fingers to wiggle individually when all you offer the user are two electrodes? That is why currently, myoelectric ams are not built to actually enhance the users’ grip patterns – instead, they are built to pretend to enhance the users’ grip patterns. There’s a fine difference. In reality, myoelectric arms are pursued because they are a great business idea (selling little motors and simple controls for tens of thousands of dollars), while body powered technology is abandoned.

But now, hard core engineering comes back to supplement prosthetics with things that could actually work: copying not tentacles or octopussies, but cockroaches, by John Schmitt at Oregon State:

http://www.livescience.com/technology/insects-robot-design-bts-100606.html

The research methodology John Schmitt and his collaborators use is an iterative process that utilizes animal experiments and reduced-order locomotion models to inform robotic design. The models aid the development and testing of high-level control strategies that can produce robust and efficient locomotion. Comparison of the animal dynamics to both the reduced order model and robotic dynamics can test our understanding of the underlying principles that animals employ to achieve their remarkable locomotion performance. Credit: Robert Full, University of California at Berkeley and Jonathan Clark, Florida State University.

Miles to grip, eh, walk, before we sleep.