When Jason Barnes lost his arm after receiving an electric chock while cleaning a restaurant vent hood, the budding drummer thought his career was over before it began. Barnes' tale is not unlike the story of Def Leppard drummer Rick Allen - except the whole homemade cyborg add-on.

Barnes did not want to let his drumming dream go, so he built a simple drumming device out of a brace and some springs that attached to his arm. This was a temporary fix, but it was just enough to allow him to enroll at the Atlanta Institute of Music and Media in Georgia.

According to the article from the New Scientist, it was there that he caught the eye of drumming instructor Eric Sanders, who introduced him to Gil Weinberg, an engineer at the Georgia Institute of Technology. The group hatched a plan to build Barnes a robotic arm that would allow him to play just as well as any human drummer – or perhaps even better.



Last week, Barnes tried the finished device for the first time (see video). "It was pretty awesome," he says. "If it works out and it proves to be a lot more useful than my current prosthesis, I would definitely use it all the time."

For Barnes, the device needed to be able to take cues from the human body. The lab designed a prosthesis that uses a technique called electromyography to pick up on electrical signals in the upper arm muscles. By tensing his biceps, Barnes controls a small motor that changes how tightly the prosthetic arm grips the drumstick and how quickly it moves, vital skills for a drummer.

With this extra artificial intelligence, human and machine combine to make Barnes a kind of "superhuman drummer", Weinberg says.

Rock of Ages!