Web Desk(March 22, 2018): Luke Skywalker losing his right hand may turn out to be a blessing in disguise for real-life amputees. Because at the stroke of Darth Vader’s lightsaber, the grizzliest moment in “The Empire Strikes Back” has had a useful, if unintentional, consequence.
While audiences were busy digesting Darth Vader’s revelation that he was, indeed, Luke’s father, a seven-year-old Benjamin Tee was paying attention to a small scene towards the film’s end, when Skywalker is fitted with a prosthetic.
It looked like a human hand from the outside, fleshy and creased, but was powered from within by tiny pistons and circuit boards. “The hand had complete sensation,” Tee recalls, “when the robot (assistant) pokes it he is able to react.”
It looked like a human hand from the outside, fleshy and creased, but was powered from within by tiny pistons and circuit boards. “The hand had complete sensation,” Tee recalls, “when the robot (assistant) pokes it he is able to react.”“The scene stuck in my head for so many years,” he adds. “This is something that today’s prosthetic hands are unable to achieve yet.”
You can probably see where this is going.
Tee, now 35, is the president’s assistant professor at the National University of Singapore, specializing in biotechnology and the interface between humans and machines. “I ended up doing what the scene was trying to create,” he says.
“You talk to patients or people that have unfortunately lost their hands,” Tee says, “when they use a normal prosthetic they are unable to feel, and this really affects their daily activities.”
Skin, the body’s largest organ, plays a large part in how we react to objects, sensing texture, temperature and so forth. Its self-healing abilities add a brilliant if complicated extra dimension. Engineering an electronic substitute for skin is the next frontier of prosthetics, and it’s where Tee has piled his considerable expertise.
