You’ve probably seen the Frozen, Iron Man, and Star Wars prosthetics—intended to boost the confidence of kids with missing limbs. Now, you can even meet the first man with the Luke Skywalker arm. With today’s ever-increasing technology, some of these once fictional devices are making their way to real-life.

This spring, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s Haptix program hit the media with one of its newest prosthetic hand prototypes. This device from the Defense Department’s research lab adds a novel feature to prosthetic technology: a sense of touch. “Without sensation, no matter how good the hand is, you can’t perform at a human level,” Dustin Tyler, a researcher at the Functional Neural Interface Lab at Case Western Reserve University, said in a statement.* This mentality aligns with today’s goals of prosthetic technology research: to design devices that are biologically inspired, capable of mimicking the anatomical and functional features of a human limb. The only way to perform at a human level is to replicate the human form.

Link to article: http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2016/06/high_tech_prosthetic_limbs_can_ignore_the_needs_of_users.html