A poor welder with no knowledge of robotics or degree in engineering claims to have made a functional bionic arm out of junk.
I Wayan Sumardana, 31, suddenly woke up one morning with no control of his left arm. He could not move the arm at all.
The doctors he visited had no idea what happened; thus, when they could not make a proper diagnosis, Sumardana claimed that the doctors told him to go to a shaman instead. But the shamans could not help him, either.
Stuck in their house in Nyuhtebel Village in Karangasem, Indonesia with only one functioning arm, the welder could not work to support his family. One day, he took pity on his son who was hungry but they had no money to buy food.
So, Sumardana decided to use his skills to create a bionic arm out of the junk around him. Using dynamo cables, gear wheels, scrap metals, lithium ion battery, and various electronic components, Sumardana finished the contraption. Then, using a signal receiver headband that supposedly sends signals from his brain “just like a lie detector test”, he makes the arm move.
He’s being hailed as some sort of superhero in the locality but skeptics have arrived to check out whether the bionic arm was for real.
Engineering and robotics experts have belied the welder’s claims, saying his bionic arm and its headband transmitter lack key components like computer programming to process the supposed brain signals into mechanical action.
But even when experts have cast doubts about the authenticity of the invention, the locals are in awe of the guy whose mystical stories of having been possessed by some spirit (which helps him move the bionic arm while others could not use it) made him even more incredible to their eyes…
Bionic Body Parts
In the past, missing body parts could only be replaced by prosthetics that are only good as replacements to some degree but could not really function as much as the real thing can.
Advances in modern science have allowed the creation of real bionic body parts which not only resemble human body parts but can also function just as well! Although we are still far from the technology of the robots in Iron Man, we could safely say that this generation has seen a lot of functional bionic body parts that work for real!