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The gadget-related bits of the newspapers recently have been featuring a Finnish man who lost a finger in a motorcycle accident, and replaced it with a memory stick - or a 'finger drive'. Here, at our no win, no fee offices, we've been very taken with the images of him peeling back the finger from what looks like a nail to reveal a USB connector, but not without a little uncanny shudder.
This resourceful response to an incident of personal injury is rightly presented as a positive news story, but it seems it's not positive enough for this motorbike crash survivor; he's planning to upgrade the finger drive with RFID tags and an entirely removable tip.
Technology journalists have tried to suggest other gizmos that the man might want to include in further upgrades, of which my favourite so far is a mini-projector that could display DVDs on the wall of wherever he happens to be. He could, perhaps, have different fingers for different situations, like the wicked queen in Return to Oz who had a wall of optional heads.
A more serious amputation story from earlier in the year, this time involving a car accident survivor, saw a student's dreams of going to Sandhurst destroyed when his hand, hanging out of the window of a friend's car, was severed by a wooden gatepost. His new prosthetic, the i-Limb, uses tiny sensors to pick up signals from the man's arm muscles, and offers the user control as close to a human hand as has been achieved so far. He is one of almost 500 personal injury survivors fitted with this kind of prosthetic, which was cited as one of Time Magazine's Top 50 Products of 2008.
There's also details of a cybernetic arm being developed by the inventor of the Segway for Gulf War veterans, which appears to work for even whole-arm amputees, judging by the amount of video online.
But what I've been most impressed by while looking into the details of personal injury survivors and their prostheses is the story of an American performance artist whose career as a gymnast and go-go dancer had to face the aftermath of a staphylococcus infection (a bug from the same family as MRSA) that led doctors to amputate her feet and fingers when she was only 21. After beginning to explore animation and art in college, a lecturer introduced her to a choreographer, which inspired the start of her practice in contemporary dance and performance art.
She has developed performances that utilise various prosthetic limbs, from jogging springs to a set of stilt-like, bright red limbs that give an impression of the tentative grace of giraffes. She writes, "I am using my own body, both as a direct approach to animating forms, and also as a way to explore issues of physicality and difference. Despite my own terror and discomfort in being watched (or, maybe, because of it), I am finding that being in front of viewers as a performer with deformity can produce a magnetic tension that could be developed into strength."
That development into strength is deeply inspirational, and - from my corner of the no win, no fee world - I hope more people discover her work, whether they've been in a car or motorcycle accident or not.
