We're building bionic arms for flat screen TV factory amputee Rosa Moreno and over thirty volunteers have teamed up to get DrSpaceMann's brother back in the gym using prothetics.

Hey snapzu,

I got an invite for here after the reddit mods kept removing my posts -- for those of you who don't know, I offered to build a DrSpaceMann's brother from reddit a prothetic arm after he lost both his hands in an oil rig accident. After a couple of weeks or posting updates on reddit, almost forty volunteers joined in to help out. More about that here.

Last week we were trying to get in contact with Rosa Moreno, a lady who lost both her hands after a one-tonne assembly machine malfunctioned and crushed them -- and she only received $14,400 in settlement money under Mexican labor law when she has six children to feed.

We were also trying to arrange for DrSpaceMann’s brothers arm to be 3D lasered scanned so we can design his weight lifting prosthesis based on that information.

We also decided that we were going to develop the world’s first public domain medical grade myoelectric prosthesis with the help of Australian hand surgeon, Neela Janakiramanan.

We also realised that this project doesn’t have a name!

So just a quick catch up -- since the last update, Michael Kane and Andres Blank were able to put me in direct contact with Victoria Ruddy from Partners For Responsible Trade. Victoria has been working to create awareness of the situation facing Rosa and thousands of other works and she even raised money to fit Rosa with a body powered hand prosthesis. Having spoken to Victoria, we now have the confirmed go ahead to build HACKberrys for both Rosa's right and left arms, which will make her life a lot easier. The main advantage of having the HACKberry’s for Rosa will be having two working hands again -- which she can control electronically. She also requested grey HACKberry’s!

We were also been contacted by an organisation called Novabeans, who are working to provide access to technology for underprivileged people in India. They have been working with a patient in India who has suffered the exact same injury as DrSpaceMann’s brother. Novabeans have already sent me the 3D scan of the patient's arm and since he has already healed from his injury, it’s a great opportunity to get a headstart on DrSpaceMann’s brothers prosthetic while we wait for him to heal and hear back from the family. If we can design a prosthesis that works for the patient from Novabeans it will work for Ryan (with some modifications to the fitting of course, but we have a prosthetist on the team called Brian Little who can help with that -- and Maxwell Perham and Kyle Jesse have already been busy working on the designs.)

I also FINALLY had a chance to send an email out to all of the contributors; I never expected to receive offers from over forty volunteers, so a HUGE thank you to everyone from reddit for that -- the only down was that it also meant I didn't have enough time to personally reply to all of the emails.

Next week, we’re taking the 3D scan from Novabeans and using it to begin serious work on the new designs. I will also be sourcing the components and materials we need for Rosa’s HACKberrys so I can get started with building again.

If you want to checkout the pictures and videos of the designs Matt and Kyle have been working on for the weight lifting prosthesis, you should check them out HERE.

And BIG news -- Hiroshi Yamaura from exii has offered to contribute his expertise to the project -- yes guys! We're going to be working with exiii themselves, which is going to be awesome!

Also, I found this video of a woman with a pretty amazing leg prosthesis and thought it was worth sharing.

So snapzu, we really need a name for this project. If anyone has any suggestions please leave them in the comments and the suggestion with the most upvotes we’re going to run with.

(I hope I don’t regret this)