War fuels research blitz in prosthetics industry

WASHINGTON — With time and determination, Minnesota National Guard Sgt. Darrell "J.R." Salzman has learned to tie delicate trout flies with his mangled left hand and the shiny metal hook that serves as his right.

But he lacks patience for another prosthetic device — the so-called Utah arm — that the Army gave him after he lost his right limb below the elbow to an enemy bomb in Iraq in December.

"I spend more time throwing it across the room than I do actually using it, and that's no joke," the 27-year-old from Menomonie, Wis., said during a physical therapy session at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C.

The myoelectric Utah arm, made by Motion Control Inc. of Salt Lake City, has circuitry that reads muscle twitches as electric signals to open and close a hook or hand attachment. But its response time, even at less than a second, is so slow that Salzman prefers an old-fashioned, "body-powered" prosthesis, controlled by a cable and rubber bands.

"I don't like having to wait if I want to grab something," Salzman said, deftly opening his hook to remove a fuzzy black fly from a vise. "If I want to grab this woolly bugger here, I don't want to have to wait; I want to just go and grab it."

The Defense Department understands. It has contracted with a group of researchers and prosthetics manufacturers to build a thought-controlled arm at a cost of $30.4 million — part of at least $70 million the Defense Department and the Department of Veterans Affairs have committed since 2001 to develop better artificial limbs.

Dozens of companies — large and small, foreign and domestic — have received grants to invent and improve prostheses that will be used first by wounded warriors and eventually by the much larger number of civilian amputees. Wars typically yield such advancements because those who have sacrificed limbs often demand replacements that push the limits of prosthetic technology.

Because today's approximately 600 war amputees account for only a tiny fraction of the 1.9 million Americans living with limb loss, leaders of the nation's $900 million prosthetics industry say the government's investment will be seen less on their balance sheets than in the sophistication of newfangled prostheses.

"That is, in my mind, almost like what the space program did," said Thomas Kirk, president of Hanger Orthopedic Group Inc., the nation's largest provider of prosthetic patient services.