When I was in Iraq, I was a tanker.
I woke up on my 21st birthday, and I just treated it like any other day out there.
We had a patrol later that afternoon and I was in the front tank, and I got hit.
I don’t really remember anything from that point until I woke up in the hospital.
I realized I couldn't move my body and where my arm was, there was a bundle of gauze.
I had a period where I sat and focused on what I couldn’t do...
not what I could do.
My name is Jerral Hancock and I live in Palmdale, California.
I was told that the bomb hit right behind me.
But since I was instantly paralyzed, I couldn't pop the hatch.
Honestly, the first feeling I had when I woke up was guilt.
That I was in the United States, and my platoon was still in Iraq.
I'm paralyzed from my mid-chest down.
I grew up as the only man in my house, so I'm used to doing everything for myself.
So to have to ask for help with everything, it really messed me up.
I can’t really eat very well by myself.
I feed him, we have dinner together, the kids will help out as well.
Just picking up a cup or a can would be a huge deal too.
He always wants to make a cup of coffee for someone.
He wants to do stuff like play games together.
He doesn’t want to just sit, he wants to help my mom.
I feel bad that Adrianna has to do so much because I can’t help.
People risked their lives to save mine.
For me to just climb in the corner, and start crying about everything is not an option.
Because to me it's like slapping them in the face.
I heard about the APL project through a tanker friend of mine, Tom.
I brought Jerral in as someone I thought would be a great candidate
to show how the prosthetic arm could help someone
who is not only dealing with his own injuries, but has young children at home
and has to be a parent to those children.
If it will help me or anybody down the line who is in my situation, I’ll do it.
They haven't told me much about what's going to happen.
The Applied Physics Laboratory is part of the Johns Hopkins University.
The ‘Applied’ in our name is very important...
in that we really judge ourselves by the ability to take technology and provide solutions.
We work in a lab a lot, we develop things.
And it’s kind of cool to see something on a bench, moving around, picking up objects, and so forth.
But when we bring into somebody’s house, and into their life, that really can benefit from it,
and we see the reactions. Every time I see it, it's like I’m seeing it for the first time.
The MPL is the modular prosthetic limb, and this is a robotic limb
that we created for uses of prosthetic
and it has all the capability of the human arm.
I'm most excited just to see what kind of new stuff it will give me the ability to do.
We'll try to put the end of your arm bone right here.
What we’re trying to do is read an electrical signal on the surface of your skin
When he thinks about moving his phantom limb, we’re reading those electrical signals
that his brain sends to the part of his body.
And we’re trying to interpret those into something we can use to control the limb.
We have lots of robotic platforms that can move around,
but that last piece, which is to be able to form a grasp, pick up something, that’s very complex.
And we all do it with so little thought.
So our challenge is to be able to use some of these advances that we’re working with this week
in order to make that easier for people to do.
Talk about your left arm a little bit. Do you have mobility for it? Does it feel like it's locked up?
No it feels like if I think about it, it’ll move. It feels like it has the same limitations as this hand,
like I don't have full dexterity, I don’t feel like I can move the fingers on it or anything.
Ok.
I’ll do 3-2-1 go, and then think about doing your elbow up, okay?
3-2-1 go.
Ok and relax.
So now I just want to focus in on hand close and open.
So 3-2-1 close.
And hand open, 3-2-1 go.
Just to give him that ability to do something like that again -- it makes me happy.
Jerral’s signals are his own and I mean the whole point is that nobody else's are going to look like his.
He was able to control elbow “up and down” and hand “open and close”
and what this represents is to sort of show and paint that picture that this is how you
really custom fit the technology to any given person.
For him to be able to kind of voluntarily open and close a hand and elbow
is really significant in such a short period of time.
Right now this technology we are limited to the laboratory.
We’re really at the point where this can break out and really get into the home,
and stay with people in their everyday lives and that's the threshold that we want to cross now.
It's not the technology that makes something successful,
it's the way it interfaces with the human and the way people use it.
We really look at this as a beginning, and I hope that we’re back here again in the future.
And that we have many opportunities to work with Jerral.
This has far exceeded what I was expecting out of it.
It’s just amazing, I really don’t know how else to put it.
If it helps somebody somehow it's worth me doing it.
He’s not doing it just for himself. He wants to help other people.
What happened 10 years ago is 10 years ago now in my eyes.
You gotta keep looking for tomorrow.