Jon Kuniholm, "Good Design by Design" | Talks at Google

Hi everybody, hear me ok?

Okay, so I think we're going to get going.

My name is Michael Wizmalik.

Our guest today: Jonathan Kuniholm.

I met him in I think 2007, as far as we can piece back together,

at a SIFU conference, and he had some pretty cool tech that he was demoing on some robotics stuff related to prosthetics.

And I was impressed enough that I said "You should come and give a talk at Google sometime"

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."

So, we're hosting him today.

Johnathan is the president and founder of the open prosthetics project.

He's also the founder of stumpworks, a startup that focuses on prosthetic technology.

He's also presidential appointee to the national council on disability and the stuff he has to say is pretty cool.

So please, put your hands together and help me welcome Jon.

(applause)

Thanks very much Michael.

Let me just first offer a disclaimer with respect to my government job,

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.

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.

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.

And in thinking a little bit more about why prosthetic arms lagged so far behind other technology that we use everyday,

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,

which can be solved by something that we're beginning to call "public interested design."

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,

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.

because very much now I believe that most of those problems are solved in a haphazard way.

Government funded projects, philanthropy, side-projects from industry,

you name the way that people happen upon these issues and try to solve them,

but in general, you can be sure that the resources and attention that we devote towards solving these underserved

needs are going to lag far behind those problems which are very obvious from every other standpoint that needs solving.

You know, very profitable things.

There was no question that cell phone technology was going to improve over the last ten years for example.

So in the summer of 2005, I took leave from graduate school at Duke University,

and I was deployed as a marine to Iraq and Anbar province.

And I was the platoon commander for an engineer platoon of about 15 marines,

and we were doing mostly what everbody was doing over there, which was sustainment and sustainability operations,

patrolling, guarding convoys, that sort of thing.

On New Year's Day of 2005, I was on a foot patrol that was ambushed by Improvised Explosive Device,

and the blast took off most of my forearm, and I found myself back in the States,

and learning about prosthetic arm technology.

I managed to get myself back to school, and get involved with a research project sponsored by DARPA,

called the "Revolutionising Prosthetics 2009 Project."

It was one of two that DARPA was funding, which was really the first

serious prosthetic arm research effort that had occured in the United States since -

maybe there was a small one in the 70s, but really -

since World War 2.

And the goal was a really ambitious one.

The goal was to create in four years in 2007,

an arm using commercially available technology that could go to market in that year, in 2007, and then

more ambitiously, to create an arm that had more degrees of freedom, was fully neurally integrated,

so nearly the same articulation as a native human arm and full strength.

An incredibly ambitious project.

What I think is important to understand, there's been an enormous,

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,

for whatever reason, prosthetic arms to really capture the popular imagination.

People love robotics, they love thinking about the barriers, the singluarity, and barriers between man and machine disappearing

and it becomes a vehicle for all kinds of philosophical and science fiction interest.

I think the take-away about these project which is important to remember is first of all, that

we, despite the amazing things that both of these research efforts accomplished,

we still have not, ten years after the war began in Afghanistan, actually, pushing 15 now,

still do not have any commercially available device that has resulted from any of this government funded research.

We're still waiting for the first one. It has remained as always, just around the corner,

and I'm told that we're waiting on FDA approval for the DECA RP07 project to recieve FDA approval,

and it has been some clinical trials, but we still haven't seen a device.

The other one is that I think it's important to understand,

it's my belief that we have a media bias.

It's not a political or conservative media bias, but it's one towards entertainment.

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,

and with, there are some caveats that I could give, you could call a trigger grip, for example,

where one part of the hand is grasping a handle of a cordless drill, and the finger is pulling the trigger,

that tends towards manipulation. It's at least a compound grasp, one part of your hand is doing one thing, and one doing another.

Of course, the slide that I'm showing here right now, gives you some insight into what the human hands are capable of.

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.

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.

But, based on the popular press presentation of all this, you would think that it can.

You would think that these problems are solved.

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.

And we do not have bionic people and these hands are for the most part right now, it would be fair to say,

at least in terms of prosthetic control, that even these highly articulated hands are only capable of grasping,

and the difference between grasping and manipulation, I think,

you can use a Rubik's cube to illustrate.

Manipulation is a speed cuber solving a Rubik's cube in a few minutes,

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,

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.

There's some rubber grip on the fingers, a cigarette notch, and I think it's called a pen notch now.

But this remains, despite everything that's happened, the most used prosthetic terminal device in America

and, were you to go to the ...... (check) lecture conference

in New Brunswick, in Canada, this August, it would be a fair bet to make that

the majority of amputees attending the conference,

at least the ones who aren't paid to be there by a prosthetic company,

would be wearing one of these devices, and not any of the robotic prosthetic hands that are available.

The other thing that's important to know about this is that there is another choice,

which actually beats all of them, which is the one that I'm wearing today,

which is nothing.

And about half of all army amputees choose most times not to wear prostheses at all

and it's mostly because of weight and comfort and suspension:

I'm going to talk about that a little bit later.

So, now, why, why is all of that?

You know, this is by no means an attack on any of the folks

who were generous enough to fund that project and try to make some progress.

The real problem is that there simply isn't a market for these things.

The market for powered arms is just barely noticed, compared to these other large markets

and even though the government has accomplished quite a bit in some of these research projects,

the -- what we call the value of death (check), which is the bridge that one of these products must cross

in order to get from the lab into becoming a clinical product is really significant.

And without a market to drive further funding, that gap, which is estimated by people in the industry

to be something like 90% of the R and D remaining on the medical product (check)

once a proof of principle device is finished, there's simply nowhere

for these resources to come from and make it happen. (12:58)