The LUKE arm was developed by inventor Dean Kamen and his colleagues at DEKA Research & Development Corp. as part of DARPA’s Revolutionizing Prosthetics program with additional funding from the U.S. Army Medical Research and Materiel Command.
Launched in 2006, DARPA’s program began with a radical goal: develop an advanced electromechanical prosthetic upper limb with near-natural control that would dramatically enhance independence and quality of life for amputees.
Working with DARPA and the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) Rehabilitation Research and Development Service under a federal interagency agreement, DEKA spent years directly engaged with amputees in a number of studies, including VA studies, to better understand how the intersection of biology and engineering could ultimately lead to advanced prosthetic technologies.
Mobius Bionics was launched in July 2016 to bring the LUKE arm to market. At a ceremony in New York in 2017, two veterans living with arm amputations became the first recipients of a new generation of prosthetic limb that promises them unprecedented, near-natural arm and hand motion.
