Has anyone tried to adapt these arms to assist a person with limited or no use of their arms?
My brother is afflicted with ALS and has lost most of his arm function.
Voice controlled would be preferred. Is this possible?
Of course its possible. Its 2007 now, we control robots through our thoughts. With smart planning a low budget one can be whipped up easily, you just need the right resources.
A lightweight but strong skeleton frame to adapt to arm length.
Silent, lightweight, powerful and flat actuators.
Tiny MCU (probably 1st or 2nd most expensive) preferably by the shoulder with voice recognition.
I dont know if you have the team, research will and funds to look into nuero-engineering of these things but the second best thing if he’s lost ALL function is voice recognition. If he can joints up/down/left/right a tiny bit, you might be able to get away with sensors.
You would have to give a detailed description of what the arm would be expected to do. Typical servo based arms don’t have a lot of power to do any type of heavy work. That being said, you would only be limited by your creativity, time, and $$$ if you wanted to get into heavy lift setups.
Yooh Ripa - sorry to hear about your brother’s plight. Lou Gehrig’s is a mighty struggle. This topic came up once before on this forum. Perhaps reaching out to this gentlemen could provide you with more definitive answers.
lynxmotion.net/viewtopic.php?t=761&highlight=als
I will try to dig up more contact info for the guy in this thread. I spoke to him on phone a long while ago and offered to provide what assistance I could through the forum but he was looking for a full time engineer to design his brother a similar device you are calling for.
Chris
Here it is
James is the CEO of this foundation. He too has a brother with ALS and he was looking for similar cohesion/operation between a robotic arm and his brother’s remaining faculty. Perhaps you should read his story and then try to contact him for help. James may be able to help you in more ways than your request.
His amazing brother’s story
als.net/ffc/familyStory.asp?familyID=28
James’ email
[email protected] [email protected]
Unfortunately I did not save his phone number
Tell him what you are working on and go from there.
Good luck to you and your brother
Sincerely
Chris
I’m thinking of simple applications. As simple as opening the 'fridge, or holding/using a fork or spoon would allow some independence. Probably mounted to a wheelchair which will be needed in the near future.
Voice recognition would be best.
I’m a self employed machinist so making stuff is not a problem. the interface between a voice program and the servo’s would be the challenge, unless one is available.
I don’t have the resources for major engineering nor interested in profiting from this.
I’m thinking of the smallest arm available for light useage.
I’d go with a Lynx 6 Arm from the Lynxmotion website. To open the fridge, you can have the gripper hold the handle and drive the wheelchair backwards. using the arm to hold utensiles shouldn’t be a problem either since I know people have used the arm to pick up pencils and write with them. To control the arm with speech, you can use a speakjet (i dont know anything about them, but plenty of people here do). It may be a little tricky to program if your not acustomed to it, but it will work. Hope this helps! 
The gripper on a Lynx-6 can exert, at most, a few ounces of force - it may be able to open a specially modified fridge with a pushbutton release or something, but I wouldn’t bet on it coming close to prying open the door of a standard fridge with a magnetic gasket.
The SpeakJet is a speech synthesizer unit, not a recognition unit. It makes words - and does so quite well, but does not respond to them.
oops, sorry for the mislead 
thanks for clearing that up zoomkat, speech recognition it is!