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Comment by CWIZO | Hacker News Reader

Could this be used to type on a keyboard? Or if anyone knows of a hand which would allow the wearer to do that?

I really like the general progress in this field and I can imagine in 5-10 years they will have completely functional prosthetics.

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It would seem to me that if you're going to replace a hand with a prosthetic anyway, that it makes little sense to limit yourself to normal keyboards. Keyboards are designed with the limitations and function of human hands in mind. Why go to the effort to replicate a human hand so that you can use a keyboard, when you could just skip a step and design a prosthetic attachment that acts as a keyboard directly? Just a thought.

It wouldn't surprise me if, as prosthetics get better and better, they eventually surpass what human limbs are capable of (this has already happened to an extent with people with artificial hands able to rotate them by 180º). At that point, why not design something better than the human hand to start with? Seems like an interesting 'opportunity', if it can be called that.

AFAIK, the arm runs one of several types of gestures -- modes -- that the user selects then controls. So It's not a general purpose hand. For typing, perhaps it'd be better for this thing to have a USB port, and plug in as a keyboard?

At least as of a couple years ago, that was true, and the way the arm was engineered was very deeply tied to these modes.

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