GRASP PhD Student, Elizabeth Beattie, on CNN….”Titan Arm: Bionic bicep gives you the strength of Hercules”

October 28th, 2013

Titan Arm: Bionic bicep gives you the strength of Hercules

By: Arion McNicoll and Stefanie Blendis | Posted 25 October 2013

In the past, if you wanted to be able to be able to lift more weight you would have to spend months bulking up at the gym. Now, with a new invention from a group of engineering students at the University of Pennsylvania, you can just strap on an external bicep and you are ready to go.

The bionic device, called the Titan Arm, is the brainchild of four mechanical engineering students who, in their final undergraduate year, built an upper-body exoskeleton that can be used in physical therapy and manual labor. The invention won its inventors $10,000 in the Cornell Cup for Innovation and has recently been shortlisted for the 2013 Dyson award.

“With the Titan Arm, we wanted to create something that could both augment a user’s natural strength as well as help someone perform physical therapy in their own home,” says Elizabeth Beattie, one of the Titan Arm’s inventors. “We wanted to create something that was low-cost and easy for a user to put on and strap to themselves.”

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