A New Prosthetic Arm for Soldiers

For my TED Talk analysis, I chose a talk by a man named Dean Kamen called Luke, a new prosthetic arm for soldiers, where Dean talked about creating a robot arm for people, mostly soldiers, who had lost their original. This was filmed in 2007 when this type of technology wasn’t “available right now”, so really the fact that the arm was created as well as it was is quite an accomplishment. Additionally, the prototype was built in under 13 months; in just over a year, they changed countless lives.

First of all, the appearance of the speaker, Dean Kamen, is not one of authority. His hair is messy and he is wearing denim on denim. He should have dressed up nicer considering people are going to look to him as a leader for this movement. The speaker talks in a very monotone voice throughout the entire speech, and if he wasn’t talking about something quite interesting and life changing, then the TED Talk would have been exceptionally boring but would have seemed even worse. His posture is consists of slumped shoulders and makes him look like he is uncomfortable and unprepared to give this talk in front of a live audience (plus over 1 million online views).

He demonstrated with his own arm what the robot prosthetic arm should be able to do and that was very good use of movement. Kamen seemed stiff standing up on stage. He looked like he needed a podium to ease himself.

A few of his jokes went right over the audience’s head. They didn’t laugh when he paused for laughter and that just felt super awkward. When people did laugh, there were maybe 7 audible people. This felt really weird and forced too. There were a lot of uncomfortable coughs during the talk. The video did not show the audience very much until the very end which is not like any other TED Talk that I have watched before. At the end though, when the audience was shown, they were giving a standing ovation for the new technology that they just witnessed. They were amazed by what technology the future holds for us.

This is relevant to my Service Learning organization because they are both trying to better the disabled. TOPSoccer is trying to make mentally challenged children more socially adept and Kamen is trying to help people without arm(s), specifically soldiers, do more everyday tasks such as eating and picking up pens.

Source: https://www.ted.com/talks/dean_kamen_previews_a_new_prosthetic_arm#t-226085