Bench Talk

Arduino single board microcontrollers were originally designed for students and do-it-yourselfers (DIYers) in the early years of the millennium. Increasingly, however, they are finding their way into commercial products. This trend is especially evident in the fields of prosthetics and human augmentation, where they have become one of the standard components. In fact, the use of Arduino technologies has become so common that well-established manufacturers of microcontrollers such as Microchip Technology and its subsidiary Atmel include a growing list of Arduino-based or Arduino compatible hardware among their products.

Arduino technologies have the advantage of offering a complete solution, including:

• An easy-to-use yet sophisticated programming language (sometimes called Arduino C) that can be extended through plugins and C++ libraries, and includes a command for flashing a device's firmware via a USB port on any computer running Linux, OSX, or Windows.
• An integrated development environment (IDE) that can be extended with plugins.
• A large and active community of both volunteers and salaried employees drawn from many walks of life that offer both and suggested modifications.
• Open-source software and hardware, including numerous plans and specifications released under a Creative Commons license, all which can significantly reduce development and time to market.

In addition to these advantages, Arduino boards, such as the widely employed Arduino Uno and Arduino Mega Microcontroller Boards, are low in cost. At a conservative estimate, manufacturing a device made with Arduino Technologies can often cost under a tenth of those manufactured under traditional proprietary standards. For example, ALICE, a project reported to be the first open source robotic exoskeleton, costs under $1,000, while a comparable product produced by a proprietary company costs approximately eighty times as much. Even allowing for cost overruns, this price difference makes Arduino-based prosthetics affordable for those with low incomes or for war-ravaged developing countries. Just as importantly, the financial barriers for contributing to development have been significantly lowered.

Given these advantages, no one should be surprised that Arduino-based prosthetics and devices for human augmentation are being produced at all levels of experience and expertise. At the simplest level, hobbyist sites offer prosthetic pen-holders and sensors for heat and touch, while a Kickstarter project was recently funded to produce a kit from which students can affordably build a robotic exoskeleton. Similarly, the Arduino main site mentions an assistive exoskeleton arm build from a windshield wiper motor and controlled by an Arduino board that cost approximately $100 to build. Other such projects can be found on Instructables.com, a site on which teachers post lesson plans and class projects, as well as Hackaday.io, a site for DIYers. Such projects would have been unimaginable a decade ago before Arduino technologies had proved themselves.

At a commercial level, Arduino-based devices are even more sophisticated. Besides the expected prosthetics for amputated limbs and the development of exoskeletons, efforts are branching out in more exotic directions. Gershon Dublon and Joseph A. Paradiso of the MIT Media Lab developed Tongueduino, a grid of electrodes attached to the tongue that provides spatial and directional data to the blind. Tongueduino, runs through an Arduino controller, and connects to one of several environmental sensors. Each sensor might register electromagnetic fields, visual data, sound, ambient movement — anything that can be converted into an electronic signal.

At all levels, much of the effort to develop Arduino-based prosthetics and human augmentation centers on e-Nable. e-Nable started in 2011, when founder Ivan Owen developed a functional puppet hand to wear to a cyberpunk convention and posted a video showing the process of building the hand online. The video brought responses from disabled people asking for similar devices for themselves. From there, e-Nable developed into a Google group and finally a project. Today, e-Nable includes 20,000 members who together have developed some 7,000 devices, the majority of which are built on Arduino-technologies. As well as the usual forums, the site includes schematics, blogs, and articles on featured projects, lists of resources, and fund-raising projects for chapters around the world. E-Nable's About Page describes its members as "makers, tinkerers, artists, designers, humanitarians, teachers, parents, children, engineers, occupational therapists, medical professionals, philanthropists, inventors and everyday people"—a list that suggests just how diverse the use of open source technologies, especially Arduino, has become.

The development of Arduino-based prosthetics and devices for human augmentation is just starting to show results. Many projects have yet to have their efforts medically certified, although the lack does not stop them from being used. No doubt some of the efforts in these fields will fail, but, because they are open source, none of their efforts will be lost, and anything useful in them can be picked up by others. But, no matter what happens, Arduino technologies have already heavily influenced these fields, and are likely to continue to do so in the years to come.