Jonathan Kuniholm

Jonathan Kuniholm, an Iraq veteran who lost his arm in 2005, is one of 300 engineers working on DARPA’s Revolutionizing Prosthetics 2009 program, which was created to solve the thorny interdisciplinary problems that stand in the way of creating truly functional prosthetic arms.

An international team led by The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Md., has developed a prototype of the first fully integrated prosthetic arm that can be controlled naturally, provide sensory feedback and allows for eight degrees of freedom—a level of control far beyond the current state of the art for prosthetic limbs. Proto 1, developed for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Revolutionizing Prosthetics Program, is a complete limb system that also includes a virtual environment used for patient training, clinical configuration, and to record limb movements and control signals during clinical investigations.

Jesse Sullivan, a former high-power lineman, lost both arms in 2001 after being electrocuted on the job. In these three photos, he demonstrates the capabilities of the Proto 1 prosthetic arm system during clinical tests at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago.