Drumming Arm

Jason Barnes lost his lower arm in 2012. This prosthesis reads the muscle signals in his forearm and predicts the grip he intends, in real time, on an embedded board.

Jason Barnes, a drummer and composer from Atlanta, lost his lower right arm in an electrical accident in 2012. Determined to keep playing, he teamed up with researchers at Georgia Tech to build a drumming arm that lets him play almost as naturally as with his own arm.

Google funded the project as a research collaboration with Georgia Tech. I led development across the embedded systems, electronics, real-time control software and machine learning.

A deep-learning model reads muscle activity through electromyography (EMG) and predicts how firmly Jason means to grip. A motion sensor sharpens the prediction, and the model runs on an embedded board with TensorFlow Lite.

The arm was featured at Google I/O 2021 and published at ICRA 2021. Google’s Forward Rhythm page tells more of Jason’s story.