9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 Hi everybody, hear me ok? 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 Okay, so I think we're going to get going. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 My name is Michael Wizmalik. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 Our guest today: Jonathan Kuniholm. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 I met him in I think 2007, as far as we can piece back together, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 at a SIFU conference, and he had some pretty cool tech that he was demoing on some robotics stuff related to prosthetics. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 And I was impressed enough that I said "You should come and give a talk at Google sometime" 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 and he took that to heart, and about four or five years later, emailed me and said "Hey, you offered that talk at Google. Now would be a great time." 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 So, we're hosting him today. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 Johnathan is the president and founder of the open prosthetics project. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 He's also the founder of stumpworks, a startup that focuses on prosthetic technology. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 He's also presidential appointee to the national council on disability and the stuff he has to say is pretty cool. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 So please, put your hands together and help me welcome Jon. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 (applause) 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 Thanks very much Michael. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 Let me just first offer a disclaimer with respect to my government job, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 and they encourage us to do this, that everything I say today are my personal views and not reflective of any position of the government. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 So what I would like to talk about today is how we can design good design to solve problems that society has for the most part neglected. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 And I came across one of the problems personally after I lost my arm in 2005 and discovered that prosthetic arms were an orphan medical device. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 And in thinking a little bit more about why prosthetic arms lagged so far behind other technology that we use everyday, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 I started to realise that prosthetic arms and orphan medical devices are part of a larger group of those problems that society has tended to neglect, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 which can be solved by something that we're beginning to call "public interested design." 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 And the question that I'd really like to talk about today, and I would actually like it to be the beginning of a discussion, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 because it's something that by no means I claim to have begun to solve is how can we marshall all of the tools at our disposal trying to better solve those problems. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 because very much now I believe that most of those problems are solved in a haphazard way. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 Government funded projects, philanthropy, side-projects from industry, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 you name the way that people happen upon these issues and try to solve them, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 but in general, you can be sure that the resources and attention that we devote towards solving these underserved 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 needs are going to lag far behind those problems which are very obvious from every other standpoint that needs solving. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 You know, very profitable things. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 There was no question that cell phone technology was going to improve over the last ten years for example. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 So in the summer of 2005, I took leave from graduate school at Duke University, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 and I was deployed as a marine to Iraq and Anbar province. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 And I was the platoon commander for an engineer platoon of about 15 marines, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 and we were doing mostly what everbody was doing over there, which was sustainment and sustainability operations, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 patrolling, guarding convoys, that sort of thing. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 On New Year's Day of 2005, I was on a foot patrol that was ambushed by Improvised Explosive Device, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 and the blast took off most of my forearm, and I found myself back in the States, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 and learning about prosthetic arm technology. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 I managed to get myself back to school, and get involved with a research project sponsored by DARPA, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 called the "Revolutionising Prosthetics 2009 Project." 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 It was one of two that DARPA was funding, which was really the first 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 serious prosthetic arm research effort that had occured in the United States since - 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 maybe there was a small one in the 70s, but really - 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 since World War 2. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 And the goal was a really ambitious one. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 The goal was to create in four years in 2007, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 an arm using commercially available technology that could go to market in that year, in 2007, and then 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 more ambitiously, to create an arm that had more degrees of freedom, was fully neurally integrated, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 so nearly the same articulation as a native human arm and full strength. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 An incredibly ambitious project. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 What I think is important to understand, there's been an enormous, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 and this picture is up here, not to brag that I was on 60 minutes, but to show the kind of attention that these projects got, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 for whatever reason, prosthetic arms to really capture the popular imagination. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 People love robotics, they love thinking about the barriers, the singluarity, and barriers between man and machine disappearing 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 and it becomes a vehicle for all kinds of philosophical and science fiction interest. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 I think the take-away about these project which is important to remember is first of all, that 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 we, despite the amazing things that both of these research efforts accomplished, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 we still have not, ten years after the war began in Afghanistan, actually, pushing 15 now, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 still do not have any commercially available device that has resulted from any of this government funded research. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 We're still waiting for the first one. It has remained as always, just around the corner, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 and I'm told that we're waiting on FDA approval for the DECA RP07 project to recieve FDA approval, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 and it has been some clinical trials, but we still haven't seen a device. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 The other one is that I think it's important to understand, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 it's my belief that we have a media bias. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 It's not a political or conservative media bias, but it's one towards entertainment. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 And so the word bionic is used a lot, the words dextrous and manipulation are also used a lot, which have very specific meanings in robotics, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 and with, there are some caveats that I could give, you could call a trigger grip, for example, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 where one part of the hand is grasping a handle of a cordless drill, and the finger is pulling the trigger, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 that tends towards manipulation. It's at least a compound grasp, one part of your hand is doing one thing, and one doing another. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 Of course, the slide that I'm showing here right now, gives you some insight into what the human hands are capable of. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 This pair of hands is doing a card trick, where four cuts of the deck are being controlled by different parts of the two hands. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 And it's a dynamic movement, and so I guarantee you that there isn't a robotic hand of any kind that could do these card tricks right now. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 But, based on the popular press presentation of all this, you would think that it can. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 You would think that these problems are solved. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 So I think it's important to acknowledge the strides that were made by these research projects, it's also very important to understand that we are not there yet. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 And we do not have bionic people and these hands are for the most part right now, it would be fair to say, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 at least in terms of prosthetic control, that even these highly articulated hands are only capable of grasping, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 and the difference between grasping and manipulation, I think, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 you can use a Rubik's cube to illustrate. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 Manipulation is a speed cuber solving a Rubik's cube in a few minutes, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 and grasping is not dropping it. And grasping a Rubik's cube is actually something that I can do with the hook that I wear when I do wear a prosthetic arm, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 which is the Dorance 5X, named after the guy who patented it in 1912, and you can see that since then it has evolved a little bit. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 There's some rubber grip on the fingers, a cigarette notch, and I think it's called a pen notch now. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 But this remains, despite everything that's happened, the most used prosthetic terminal device in America.