Bionic hands sound like something straight out of the terminator but they are becoming an available and more affordable option for amputees. Prosthetics have been existed since the middle ages and advancements in prosthetic technology were spurred forward by a research initiative following World War II. Simple grasping mechanisms exist, but for the most part amputees must live life without the use of one hand. Prosthetic hands do not allow the use of fine motor skills and are as much for appearance as function. Bionic hands have the opportunity to revolutionize the prosthetics industry and enable people who have lost a hand to regain control of an artificial extremity and return to some semblance of normalcy.
Multiple sensors in a bionic hand take information from the user’s nervous and muscle system and process it in order to determine the hand’s action. The objective is to create a bionic hand that will respond similarly to a regular hand. The user won’t have to consciously think about moving his fingers but will naturally be able to control its movement. The currently available bionic hand is a sophisticated model that costs between and $12,000 and $19,000 and is effectively half the price of other available electronic hands. This is a fairly small price to pay if it means that a person can function normally without being handicapped for the rest of his life. Perhaps one day soon, we will have the ability to create a hand identical to the human hand, which might be useful if it got chopped off by a light saber. Cyborgs would be pretty cool too. Just for fun, who is your favorite humanoid robot, bionic person, or cyborg?