ProDigits can be controlled two ways: by myoelectric sensors that register muscle signals from the palm or the remnant finger, or by a pressure sensitive switch from a force resistive sensor. The degree of functionality they give back to people is truly incredible, as you can see in the video below (patient demonstrations start at 1:18).

We at Gizmodo have been known to have a soft spot for all things cybernetic, but it's especially cool and gratifying to see technology used to help people get their normal lives back. [Touch Bionics via Slashgear]

While most of these upgrades aren't exactly available at this time, it doesn't mean we can't play around with the options. My personal favorite is the Brain-Machine Interface, but what would you break the bank for? Or do you require something so incredible that it's not even in the Bionic Body Shop? [IEEE Spectrum]

This week, Gizmodo is exploring the enhanced human future in a segment we call This Cyborg Life. It's about what happens when we treat our body less as a sacred object and more as what it is: Nature's ultimate machine.

The 26-year-old construction worker ate the metal for months, and told Peru's Channel 9 television that he may now do it in public "as sport."

"I swallowed 17 nails in February and didn't die," he said. "Five-inch nails, all in one day."

Doctors weren't surprised to find that Abanto had torn a hole in his stomach, so let this be a lesson to the kids out there—eating your way to a cyborg body isn't the best idea. Naturally, the man's mental health is being evaluated while he recovers. [AP via Metro Image via blurradial]

The picture above implies that the watch had a gigantic keyboard attached to it, which is a little misleading. The UC-2100 keyboard is actually a pocket-sized dock that is used to control the device. There was also the option of purchasing the larger UC-2200 which included a spool-fed printer, 4K of RAM and a 26K of ROM via a plug-in Application ROM pack (contained Microsoft Basic—other ROM packs included games or an English-Japanese translation app). Essentially, this keyboard turned your watch into a PC with a really, really tiny 10x4 character display.

In 1984, purchasing the Wrist Information System would have set you back $300—or about $624 in today's dollars. Makes that smartphone seem like a bargain doesn't it? [Pocket Calculator Show]

Thanks to space age harness technology and alien plastics gleaned from UFO crashes, you can now seamlessly integrate a laptop into your body. It goes where you go—like an extension of your flesh and bone. Amazingly, this upgrade only costs $40—but if you act now our trained team of scientists and surgeons will implant a cellphone directly on your skull for no extra charge. [Connect a Desk]

Because of it's compact size, users can move about in tight spaces easier than they could in a wheelchair or scooter—and it can travel at speeds of up to 12 mph making it a efficient method of transport. Essentially it's a Segway that you can wear. Yeah, it sort of makes people look like a vacuum, or like they are wearing some sort of robotic skirt—but there is no doubt that this concept is certifiably badass.

Production versions of the Chariot should be available sometime in the near future, and there are plans to integrate a feature that would allow users to switch from a standing to a seated position as needed. [Business Wire via Gizmowatch via Botopolis]

He'll be back on a training bike in a few days, with his chances for the Tour in July still up in the air. Feel better, Lance. Have them install some synthetic muscles in there while you're recovering. [SFgate, Deadspin, Twitter, Twitpic]

He's built with a pair of metal rods that run down his face, and over forty screws are bolted to his head holding his jaw and skull together.

Surgeons were forced to construct the biotechnological terror now known as Robo-Croc after a car crushed his formerly ordinary-but-endangered crocodile head last year. He's not eaten in three months. They're hoping that by reinforcing his snout and reconstructing his head and face with a similar texture, they can get him to eat again.

Perhaps they should start with one-handed pirates that have cybernetic limbs. I wonder if he's still going to get his brains scrambled by magnets, though? [Telegraph]

The 22 pound battery-operated system is belted to your waist and captures brain signals through sensors attached to your skin. HAL supposedly works effortlessly with your muscles, increasing your strength up to 10 times the norm without turning you all jolty and robot-like. Think Iron Man instead of Robocop. If the price is a little too much for you, you can rent a cheaper option= one leg for $1,460.

But really, can you put a price on looking this good? [Daily Mail]

In the second part Kamen talks about how the arm's control systems were developed, simplifying an 18-degrees of freedom movement space so that it could be controlled almost subconsciously by the user.
Part three is where Kamen talks about his not-for profit scheme to get young people interested in science through robots: "For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology" (FIRST); "like sports, nobody ever walks around saying 'I wanna be second'."

Interesting stuff, as I said, and the Luke arm seems to have a pretty astounding future ahead of it. I can't help thinking I'd've asked a few more direct questions though. Is the arm dexterous enough for it to let a wearer/user use the toilet? When the Luke arm gets to that level of sophistication—and, more importantly, when its developer/users trust it enough to do intimate tasks like that with it—that's the point at which I reckon the arm will stop being a science-technology showpiece and really make a difference in people's lives. Over to you in the comments. [Kara.AllthingsD]

Dean says that fatalities are down because of battlefield tech and triage methods. But that many soldiers are coming back missing limbs. He wanted to make an arm to replace their missing ones. He wants it sensitive enough to pick up a grape or allow soldiers to use a razor to shave, but be self-contained in terms of power. And a two- year deadline.

He say that a year later, they built an 8.9-pound arm using titanium, custom motors, and so on. There's 18 degrees of freedom, and they're now seeing a demo of a man who is scratching his nose. Dean says he did this in one year.

The control techniques are revolutionary. He's playing a video of a guy who didn't have both his arms for 18 years, and learned how to use the arms effectively in less than two dozen hours of training. He's showing a video that shows a guy who knows how to punch, pass a Ping Pong ball to his friend and pour a drink for another man who is holding a cup with the same type of arm. Then the video shows Chuck, the man with no arms, for the first time in 13 years, feeding himself cereal.

Holy shit, now he's showing a video of a guy using the arm using only his MIND. He learned this technique in two days, but Dean says it was more like the system learned how to interface with the human.

Looking at what he's doing, the guy drinks and people applaud. It's been two days. But the amazing thing is that he's put the cup down so it's become a lower brain stem function in two hours of doing cup functions.

Attaching the arm directly to nerves required a lot of surgery.

But there are limited arm functions, even if it's very complicated. Learning how to control a back hoe, with four controls, takes years. And the arm has 18 degrees of freedom. But people don't learn how by using each degree. In fact, it's more efficient, Dean says. There are three degrees of freedom, so they did macros. With this, a man learned how to pick up bottles, nails and other items.

Attaching the arm was a challenge, day to day. Nine pounds on an arm is heavy over a few minutes, let alone a day. So they knew that no one would wear them because of that. So Dean designed air bladders that shift the weight on the body when passive (like fidgeting in a chair) and inflate to be hard when the servos in the arm detect load.

When they did a demo for the secretary of the Army, they showed a man picking up 12 grapes and eating them without breaking or dropping any.

You can literally use infrared light, reading signals going through the skull without any invasive insertion. That's what we're working on next as a controller.

Dean is taking five minutes to explain the plight of the modern world and the responsibility of the smart, rich people in the world to help change that. I'm not sure I have the words to express his thoughts, so I'll wait for the official D video and embed it here later.

Vid from All Things D:

[All Things D]

If this sounds familiar, that's because the Splitfish FragFX controller does the same thing, except for the PS3. There's also the Xbox 360-like design of the Cyborg, which is perfect for all the ports of Xbox 360 games heading to Games for Windows this year. Also included in the setup is a Cyborg headset, which has 5.1 surround sound audio (three drivers in each ear) and a mic for jive talking. No pricing on either one, but they should be released later this year. [IGN]

Here's what I recall about it. He was approached by Darpa to develop the worlds best prosthetic arm. Our men and women wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan deserve it. We owe it to them.

The General from Darpa gave Kamen basically this blue sky order: I want an arm that's so precise that a person could pick up a grape or a raisin and without looking be able to tell the difference.

At first Dean begged off. It was too hard, it was too resource intensive, DEKA had a lot of other projects on the table. But Dean said he'd go to military hospitals and meet with the people. He met with combat wounded and was so inspired by them and their courage in meeting the challenges of life missing one or two arms that he decided they'd give it the best shot they could.

And so began DEKA's attempt to make the worlds best prosthetic limb, and do it with a very short timetable, to get it to the people who would need it.

Next Dean talked about control for this arm. He talked about brain implants and how bad an idea that was, going inside someone's skull. But then he talked about stem-cell research, and making a small implant that wouldn't be in the brain, but somewhere else in the body, maybe in the shoulder. Something that would be self-contained and communicate with the arm wirelessly. He named a research team at a big university, I forget which one. They were working on the stem-cell part of it. But, he cautioned, it may not work. The stem-cell research might not work, or it might not work in time to put it in this arm. But clearly this was the key to two-way neural contact. Control AND feeling.

So if that didn't work, or not in time, they had a number of other control schemes that they were looking at, and they were all better than the current standard.

At this point, Dean described what current motorized limbs were like. They strapped against a shoulder, and if they moved at all, they're controlled by kind of jamming the opposing shoulder which pulls the strapped limb so that a button gets pressed on it. If they're motorized they have a kind of a hook, or in some cases a cosmetic hand.

These hands are kind of one-size or a couple sizes and a couple of skin colors fit all.

So the first thing on Dean's list was that these would be the best looking prosthetic arms ever. Number one, these arms would match the person. And this would be achieved by taking a cyberscan of the other arm and making an exact mirror image. With nails, skin tone, size, bone size, everything matching. If the person didn't have another arm, a match would be found.

The next thing to tackle would be movement. From the looks of the video, this is coming along nicely. I wonder what the control scheme actually is on this video. I don't know. But I do know that they're shooting the moon.

And I don't think there was a dry eye while he was describing this to us. It was like watching the impossible become real.

Thanks for the update, tipster. – Jason Chen

What most are assuming is that there is some sort of neurological interface, but I'm doubting that's the case. We do know that it was developed for military amputees and that people were literally crying in the audience during its premier. If you have more info on the device, do us a favor and share it in the comments. Until then, I'm assuming that this video is of the new Terminator that must be destroyed at all costs.– Mark Wilson

First Cyborg Arm [digg]
TED: Dean Kamen's Cyborg Arm [boing boing]

Scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory filed a patent earlier this month for eye and ear implants that can be controlled from outside the implantee's body. The patent application discusses things like magnetic forces and electrode arrays, but as far as we can make out it's not anywhere near as amazing as how your mom still gets you to clean your room from 100 miles away.

Remote Controlled Implants On The Way [personaltechpipeline, thanks, Luku!]
United States Patent Application 20060052656 [US Patent & Trademark Office]