Having two arms isn’t such a bad gig. We can hold and play guitars and other instruments. We can eat an ice cream cone as we use the other arm to hail a cab. We can give someone a full-forced bear hug without even breaking a sweat. However, wouldn’t it be cool to simply have more arms? Imagine the crazy guitars we could play. Imagine the number of ice cream cones we could eat at once(while hailing a cab.) Imagine, uh, an even bear-ier hug. Well, wearable technology is on top of this, one of the modern world’s most pressing concerns. Two is nice, but doesn’t that mean that four would be twice as nice? Why yes, yes it does.
Researchers at MIT have created a set of wearable robot arms that, in effect, give you a whole extra set of hands to play with. The inventors imagine scenarios in which you need this extra hands, such as getting your keys out while holding bags of groceries or hammering down a nail on a slippery piece of wood. You know, all of those things that usually make you internet with, blech, another person. But seriously, this kind of tech would be extremely cool for work productivity in certain industries and a whole lot of other stuff. This whole package only weighs ten pounds, so using them won’t make you need a robot back after a while. That is extremely more complicated.
This tech is, of course, still new so don’t go camping out at your local robot arm store just yet. We’ll let you know when these come closer to consumer reality. Although, if you really wanted to use a pair, perhaps you should befriend some MIT researchers.
