Control this prosthetic arm with your mind and muscles
Jason Morris grabs a spray bottle and carries it across the room. It sounds unremarkable, until you realize he’s wrapped his fingers around it with a prosthetic arm called the Atom Touch. It’s the world’s first prosthetic arm with individual finger control, and it’s noninvasive.
“We’ve put so much capacity into this that it’s a level beyond where prosthetics are now,” he said. Atomic limbs CEO Tyler Hayes. I visited the company’s headquarters in Palo Alto, California, to see the arm in action.
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The Amputee Coalition estimates that 5.6 million people in the U.S. are living with limb loss or limb deformity. Most other prosthetic arms available today consist of separate elbow, wrist, and hand components from different manufacturers. A prosthetist then assembles them all. The Atom Touch is an entire arm, with the battery and computer in the forearm.
The wearer puts a cuff around their stump, which has electrodes on the inside that measure muscle activity via EMG, or electromyography. Essentially, you control the arm by thinking about the action you want it to perform.
Other prosthetics are also controlled by electrical muscle signals, called myoelectric prostheses. But they don’t offer individual finger control like the Atom Touch. BrainCo unveiled a finger-control prosthetic in 2020, but it’s a hand instead of an arm, and it’s not yet commercially available.
Morris lost his arm 12 years ago in an accident at work. He showed me how to pull and control the arm, which you can see in the video on this page. He can control every joint, including the wrist, so that it moves up and down.
“It’s really important to grab a glass of water when I go in [so] “I don’t have to twist my whole body to level the hand,” Morris said. Atom Touch also has haptic feedback, so when the fingers make contact with something, the socket vibrates.
Atom Limbs will undergo clinical trials and FDA approval for its artificial arm, with expected availability in 12 to 18 months. The cost will be about the same or less than a body-powered prosthetic hook, which currently costs about $25,000.
“It’s a satisfaction you just can’t explain,” Morris said as he described his experience wearing the arm. “It’s something I’ve been missing for 12 years and now I’m finally getting it back.”
