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Camp Pendleton Marine First Ever To Receive Revolutionary Prosthetic Arm (Video)

Marine Gets Cutting Edge Prosthetic Arm

Camp Pendleton Marine Staff Sgt. James Sides recently became the first human being to be fitted with a cutting-edge prosthetic arm he can control using own muscles.

Sides lost his arm in Afghanistan on July 15, 2012 to an improvised explosive device.

The Pentagon Channel reports surgeons at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center implanted small sensors called implantable myoelectric sensors (IMES) into Sides's upper arm in June 2013.

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According to Marine Corps Times:

[T]he system uses sensors the size of rice grains to communicate with the muscles in an amputee’s upper arm. Once these sensors are surgically implanted, they allow the muscles to manipulate a prosthetic, giving the patient greater ease of movement and much wider range of motion than conventional prosthetics.

Sides is patient No. 1 — reports Popular Science — in a U.S. Food and Drug Administration investigational device trial.

Sides tells Popular Science he feels like he got his arm back:

"I still close what I think is my hand. I open my hand, and rotate it up and down; I close my fingers and the hand closes. It’s exactly as if I still had a hand. It’s pretty gnarly.”

Fox News reports Sides plans to retire from the Marine Corps on March 30. He will then attend community college in California, with hopes of earning a degree in geology.