Boy, oh boy, was last night’s presentation a doozy?!

Dr. Goldfarb, a thin fellow, prone to blinking a lot, told us about his biomechanical engineering/science work at Vanderbilt University.

[Disclosure: I had the choice of Georgia Tech or Vanderbilt for my four-year U.S. Navy ROTC scholarship in 1980, which means I should be biased toward Vanderbilt, but I’m also a football season ticket holder for the University of Tennessee, an in-state sports rival to Vanderbilt, so it probably balances out.]

I took notes during the presentation, recording some of the technical details of the work performed at the Center for Intelligent Mechatronics by Goldfarb and dozen or so assistants (which he showed in a slide at the end of his presentation — looked like 11 males and 1 female, assuming their faces reflected stereotypical gender roles and none of them are cross-gender dressers like Bradley Manning).

After I returned home and ate my wife’s peach-glazed pork roast with sweet potatoes, I took a short jog around the neighbourhood, processing what Goldfarb’s research meant for me, a person who could, at any time, suffer a debilitating injury should a drunk/texting driver jump the curb and hit me before I have time to react.

What’s it like to lose a fully-functioning limb?

What’s it worth to put in the time to learn to use an artificial limb, one assisted by microprocessor-centred circuitry?

Goldfarb’s approach to prosthetic devices is the least-invasive — no tapping into the brain or surgically implanting electrodes in nerve/muscle tissue.

There’s a whole industry devoted to this type of technology and history has shown us that prosthetics are valuable.

We can take the humorous approach and think of Captain Hook or a pegleg pirate.

Humour is a valuable asset when coming to grips with the change in one’s physical capabilities while adjusting to becoming a more apparent cybernetic organism, cyborg or borg.

Goldfarb’s three main approaches to solving the problems of limb/nervous system functionality include prosthetic hand (Vanderbilt multigrasp hand), prosthetic leg (transfemoral prosthesis) and powered lower limb exoskeleton.

The state-of-the-art is always years behind science fiction fantasies.

I would wish our artificial limbs of today could operate mechanically as well as give complete skin/nerve cell feedback — hot, cold, soft, hard, calloused, sweating, etc.

But even more, I wish our artificial limbs could give us functions that are greater than the capabilities of our human counterparts, not just the boy-toy dreams of Iron Man or Avatar but something entirely outside of our current range of thoughts/emotions.

In the meantime, I encourage university researchers like Goldfarb to give people what they once had, including the young father who would like to walk to a bench seat and watch his son’s baseball team from the stands rather than from the wheelchair section; one who wants to walk down the aisle to marry his bride next August, perfectly happy with Goldfarb’s exoskeleton as it is today, but probably after bugs have been worked out and the design refined a little better for commercial use.

Speaking of which, Goldfarb said that the cost-benefit analysis of his designs show that the improved quality of life, active/reactive prosthetics reducing hospital visits because of falling down with the use of passive prosthetics, for instance, clearly offsets the initial cost of the prosthetic devices over time.

Do insurance companies agree?  Would the ACA condemn a person to a wheelchair his whole life or offer the chance of walking via exoskeleton?

Goldfarb thanked the NIH for funding some of the research at CIM.

There are hundreds of thousands of Americans — military amputees, car smashup victims, and stroke recovery patients — who can benefit from CIM’s research.  Imagine those in the rest of world who could also gain mobility?

I never hope to have to use prosthetics but look forward to the day I might, given what I saw and heard from Dr. Goldfarb last night.