The Future of Prosthetics

If there were ever such thing as a “best time” to be missing a limb, or even an eye (although you may have to wait a bit for that one), it would be today.  I know that is a terrible way of phrasing it, but it is pretty accurate!  Prosthetics innovation is currently happening faster than ever before, and because of the emergence of 3D printing as a viable solution in manufacturing, they are becoming more and more accessible in terms of cost to those who need them.  There are even companies starting to create designer prosthetics like Open Bionics, which unveiled its plans to begin manufacturing designer prosthetics targeted at children who need them that would resemble their favorite Disney characters/superheroes.  All-in-all if you are in the unfortunate situation of requiring a prosthetic for whatever reason, now you can at least get one for a reasonable price and maybe even give it a bit of personality as well.

               There is one major problem, however, that people have been (and still are) working to solve in this field, and that is integrating a sense of touch into these devices to really make them feel (I apologize for the terrible pun) real; we may be closer to that goal now than ever before though.  A research team at Stanford recently revealed that it has “developed artificial skin that can sense force exerted by objects – and then transmit those sensory signals to brain cells” (Gizmodo).  Now, this is still far off from actually feeling like real skin, but it is definitely a great start in the right direction.  According to the article, “the system is based on a low-power, flexible organic transistor circuit that transforms the feeling of pressure into the same kind of signals generated naturally by natural skin’s mechanoreceptors”.  As of right now, however, this system has only been tested by transferring signals to cultured cells in vitro because it is still very early in its development; the next step in this research would be to test it on live mice, and then eventually humans.

               Alright, so maybe the “best time” might not be exactly today, but the technology is definitely being developed and the future seems hopeful.  It really is amazing to see how humans and technology are becoming more and more integrated, whether externally through smartphone and computers, or internally though implants and prosthetics that integrate with our nervous system.  Personally, I always find it interesting to think about how far this trend will go; right now people get prosthetics out of need to replace something missing or defective, but the idea of people opting to “replace their parts” just for the sake of enhancement is really interesting.  This kind of thing has been covered in many different sci-fi films dealing with the concept of transhumanism, but it’s starting to look as if it could really be possible in the near future.  A good example would be the biotech startup (first link in this post) has plans to create synthetic eyes with perfect vision that could replace our biological ones and give us “features” like camera, video, filters, and more right in our eyes.  The real question to think about with this sort of thing would be whether or not people would actually purposefully undergo surgery purely for the sake of "enhancement", or whether or not they even should.  Maybe this is further off than they predict (and it most likely is), but that fact that people are even starting to think about actually making and selling products that integrate with and enhance our natural bodies shows that the future could be closer than we think.