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Successful Bionic Hand
nerdygeek writes: "The BBC are reporting the first successful, self-contained Bionic Hand. They've made them small enough for children but they plan to upgrade to adult sizes. It's especially good for young kids since they can adapt and learn to control it very quickly. I thought these kind of things must have been about for ages, but apparently not. I just wonder if they make a Steve Austin style noise when they're used ?" Five kids have the hands so far, about which the article has this to say: "The unit is operated by signals from the brain. The user sends a signal to move a muscle in the forearm, and electrodes detect this and pass the message on to the motors."
>If these children were meant to have hands...
So, er, it's not possible for people to lose limbs/extremities in accidents? And if they do, it's wrong to replace them?
What if it's, say, a faulty heart valve or something? Is it wrong to fix it?
Anonymous Coward 5:13 -- Thou shalt not use any medical technology, for it it naughty in mine eyes and I will smite thee.
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Sell your Viagra stocks now.
If you open yourself to the foo, You and foo become one.
If anyone has any answers, I would like to know.
I love the smell of Karma in the morning
I thought these were around a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. So now we have a real implementation of it. Wonder how long it will take to reproduce the Rebels' medical robots?
I wonder if eventually far in the future, some people will have perfectly good hands or arms replaced for the added speed and strength of a robot equivalent.
I don't think it'll happen. Here's what I think will, though:
1. It becomes possible to get robotic body parts which improve greatly on what you are born with.
2. Athletes and a few crazy rich people try them out. Rich people are left alone, athletes never compete professionaly again, unless it's for people's entertainment.
3. Robotic parts become cheaper, for whatever reason.
4. More people get robotic parts, and society in general reacts badly(ie: freak!, you're taking my job, etc., etc.).
5. Current laws pertaining to self-mutilation, where someone can be forced into psychological treatment, are amended to include the removal of body parts to be replaced by robotic equivalents. Aside from psychological treatment, fines and jail terms are now possible punishments.
6. No doctors ever replace people's body-parts, because they could lose their license.
Of course, I'm probably completely wrong. Just one thought, though.
Dave
'Round the firewall,
Out the modem,
Through the router,
Down the wire,
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
*crushes big steel flagon with bionic hand* Groovy!
I also remember that character...it wasn't 3-2-1 contact thought I'm sure of that...are you SURE it wasn't the electric company? I cant remember any others like that besides sesame street and it sure as hell wasn't THAT....
Let me know if you figure it out
"This is where god would go if he wanted to get off blow!"
> If the children can do it very easy the adults should have not much more problems.
I'm afraid I'll have to disagree there - children can learn much faster than adults when it comes to such things, and this is because the nerve pathes in their brains are still forming.
Give this to a baby, and I'm willing to bet they'll develop its use just as fast as any other appendage's motor control, and as an adult will use it with as much precision as their other hand. But give this to an adult, and I doubt they'll ever get fully used to it like their other hands, and learning the basics would take much more time.
Small childrens' brains are built to do nothing but learn, and its quite amazing how much they can learn in the time they do. Take the complexities of language, for instance. It doesn't take long at all for a child with no knowledge at all to recognise patterns in speech, mimic those patterns, learn what they mean, and start creating sentences that make sense. A small child will grow up fluent in twelve different languages if all of those are present when the brain is developing at that pace. But an adult has much difficulty learning even one new language, especially if they only grew up with one language spoken in their environment.
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grep "xercist"
Wow, these Bionic hand are a major step forward in Human Cybernetics. The hands can preform a multitude of useful tasks that were never available to a person with that disability before. Will the motors and gears ever be fast enough to compete with biological hands? Will someone with this bionic hand ever be able to type at a fast rate or be able to react in a quick motion (falling down)?
Anyone say Inspector Gadget is on the way (His hands at least)?
Does it make that cool SIx-million dollar man/bionic woman/wonder woman sound effect when the hand is used?
Yeah.. well.. um.. that's ok though. :)
BilldaCat
I'm thinking sensors at the brain level and those robots made by honda and sony.
This is scary shit.
Will these limbs be able to perform well during sex? What about masturbation? How strong is the hands grip? !
You can't handle the truth.
can I get a droid to attach it for me?
If the hand from ED3: AoD becomes a reality, I want the first one. Then maybe i can attach a chainsaw to it. THAT would be fun!
In Soviet Russia, Beowulf cluster imagines YOU!
Unless of course God left everything except for the prize rose bushes to that floozy he shacked up with down in Texas.
Pete
hehe can you imagine getting of these, what would they say next day at work/school/jail/etc Oh, bob... nice hand job... heheh so they hand thing is in deed nice.. im still waiting for those glowing eyes in pitch blackt tho.. so keep em coming!
Istigkeit -"is-ness" being and becoming & i'dfiying it with the mathematical abstraction of the idea
If you don't get the children very young, and fit them once they are able to crawl, they are not going to get much use later in life.
I could not agree more..
My daughter was born with no left hand (slight wrist action). We have tried at least two devices that "looked" like a hand, one had the ability to grasp through the action of bending the elbow. The main purpose of these was cosmetic. Well, neither worked and were very cumbersome. She has made the decision to not try another one until she is older (she's 10 now). Any person will adapt to what they are given. If I suddenly lost a hand I I would be helpless. Try tieing your shoe or buttoning up a shirt with one hand. She was doing these daily since she was three. She has NEVER been in a situation where having only one hand has hindered her in ANY way. We do not even think about it. Her lack of two hands is a 100% complete "non issue". She is getting to the age where she is starting to get concerned about looks though. Any prostectic available now might "look" appealing but would limit her ability to use what she has. Maybe this device and future products will offer a better compromise (and not cost as much as a house).
With that said... Based on my first hand experience (no pun intended) I would not suggest one of these devices until later in life. Let the child/teenager decide. Learn to use what you have. If you don't you will be forced to the likes of MS Windows and constantly refitting and upgrading this thing for the rest of your life because you never developed the skills to go without it. They do not last long, constantly need refitting and are very cumbersome (at least the two we tried years ago). I did not have any experience with this before it happened to our family. If these types of devices were readily availible when she was younger I would not have hesitated to get one, thinking it would be a greatest help to her. I am glad we did not.
Save your money and send the kid to karate classes instead, then they can beat the hell out of the other kids that make fun of them because they are different.
Sorry, spel cheker broke.
Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
It talked about using anodes and cathodes inside of animals to regenerate limbs, stop infections, and do some really neat stuff. The researchers found that an anode would if the nerves were at the edge (just below, or on the surface) and were exposed to electrons (from the anode) they would grow back the limb. Things like sealing it with skin prevented the regeneration (covering it over). They showed this in mice (or rats) and in humans. (A guy had a leg fracture that would not heal so he asked them to try to use the research to regenerate it, and they did, as opposed to the 1975- treatment if it wouln't heal in a year. it worked) They found that cathodes would kill bacteria and have a much weaker, but very similar effect upon regeneration. The reason was the electrical charges would cause the cells to de-specialize (revert to things similar to stem cells, and even to stem cells). This, if the cancer was in like a leg (of a mouse), and if the limb was amputated with a cut through the cancer, it would stop the cancer, because they too would de-specialize. It leads me to the posibility that (though I will not try it) limbs could be regenerated, if the person lost them, like salamanders and some other organisms do.
The research was pre-1975 (the book came out then) but I have not found anything has come from it. If you read the entire post, sorry for the length, and likely numerous grammer/spelling errors
Try this as a little do it at home experiment. Go construct some headware that, using mirrors, inverts your image of the world. Walk around with them on for a couple weeks- eventually you'll wake up one day and the world will be right side up again. Unfortunately there's a similar learning curve for learning to see the world correctly with the glasses off...
Here's a link to an old documentary which contains some more detailed information.
The technology is called myoelectrics and has been around since approx 1947. The article says partial hand, this gives a lot more control options than a transradial amputation. The pictur actually depicted using Otto-Bock batteries(you can see it just under the silicon glove used to give a 'lifelike' appearance to the hand. The news always seems to bring out the same stories on 'bionic' limbs, and it is the same shit over and over again.... For the electronic engineers, the system is normally: signal is taken from the muscle longitudinally filtered rectified amplified then logic circuitry is used to gain a control mechanism. this depends on available sites, muscle control, functions required..... It is the same story over and over again....
While the brain loses alot of plasticity, it is always able to adapt to changing neuromotor situations because it has to. As we age, things stop working, or change their properties, so the brain has to adjust. Also, experiments have been done in VR which have demonstrated a remarkable ability even for adults to adapt to extra limbs within hours. Don't sell the brain short. :)
For a bionic hand? Valvoline might be better :)
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www.sabolich.com is working on HOT/COLD and sense of touch.
"Do not be swept up in the momentum of mediocrity." - anon
Was that the show with the freaky character that was dressed all in black, and had toilet paper rolls in place of eyes and mouth? I swear to god such a show existed, but no-one believes me. If anyone knows what that show was, please, please, PLEASE tell me.
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"Do not be swept up in the momentum of mediocrity." - anon
So, er, it's not possible for people to lose limbs/extremities in accidents? And if they do, it's wrong to replace them? What if it's, say, a faulty heart valve or something? Is it wrong to fix it?
All things happen for a reason: the will of God. Man should not challenge that will.
...How long until bionic machine-gun arms come out?
And beyond that, how long until cyber-battle-roids are created?
Ok, maybe that's a little silly. But you know, there is no reason that I can think of (although I Am Not A Biotechnician) that you would have to make the bionic limb necessarily arm shaped... What would happen if you gave it 10 fingers, for example? Or made it double jointed? Or attactched laser beams or missile launchers, or some other b-grade sci-fi flick attchment? (Obviously some method of controling it would be needed, but that could probably be delt with, especially if you started using the destructo-hand (TM) young enough) While we're obviously not QUITE to the technical level to create fully modular limbs, it's still something to think about...
"I just wonder if they make a Steve Austin style noise when they're used ?"
I hear you move the bionic hand to give the finger, it says:
"AND THAT"S THE BOTTOM LINE, CAUSE STONE COLD SAYS SO!!!"
Better to get "You have a bionic hand? Cool!" than "Your hand .. erm .. it's very realistic. No really, I couldn't tell."
The comfort you demanded is now mandatory - Jello Biafra
He who fights and runs away,
..build his robotic exoskeleton?
Dietcrack.com -- Death to All Baldwins!
This is one step closer to creating bionic spines to help paralyzed people walk again. This would certainly be interesting, and help a lot of people out, but it goes beyond that. In theory, we could create viable exo-skeletons, which would simply use your regular brain functions to perform tasks with greater force.
I assume you could also train someone to have multiple arms with this technlogy, which would prove even more interesting.
I wonder whatever happend to 'Paco'...
http://us.imdb.com/Title?0190169
Capt. Ron
crazy dynamite monkey
Not sure if this is exactly what you mean but here's a link to some writing about v.r environments where they're talking about stimulation of various senses within v.r. as it applies to remote control of robots etc. Presumably this would be just as valid in prosthetic limbs
--feeander--
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Oh babe, I'm good for nothing - Nothing is good enough for me
Hm...maybe it was the electric company. Like I said...I'll have to meditate on it.
Didn't look pretty (and the journalist didn't ask if you had to brush your new eyes) but apparently the person could make out 'basic shapes' of objects. Enough to get around the room with little trouble.
Side topic:
Apparently there are some groups of blind people that are annoyed by this technology and the pressure they feel to be 'normal'.
Anywhoo, wouldn't go pulling teeth just yet decipher_saint apparently the tech is still 'in development'.
Following is an article about the chip side of the tech. As I mentioned above the report I saw suggested that they were getting around the rejection problems by imbedding the chip in the enamel of a tooth.
http://more.abcnews.go.com/sections/tech/DailyNe ws/cuttingedge981105.html
Omni
The other neat thing they mentioned was that, much like phantom pain, the user experienced phantom sensation, i.e. they "felt" the heat or cold at the fingertip.
Yo, Beotch! According to the Linguistic Association of America (dat be dah profeshunals, they dope), Ebonics, or Black English, is a dialect of English. It is widespread, and it does have some universal rules. If you'd like some classes in Black English, or fact checking, drop me a line.
!-- wit --!
See: it doesn't make you look any happer.
And you could come doing this (God is always played by James Mason, how could you.....)
-Are you sure it's a red alert, it will mean changing the bulb-
The big thing with this is that the motor is miniaturised to fit inside the thumb prostheses. That means its a) small enough for children, and b) the big thing is that because the mechanics are small enough to be moved into the thumb theres no mechanism between the fingers and wrist, which opens it up to people who have partial or deformed hands, who previously had to have them amputated to fit a full hand prosthetic on.
TTFN
Lauren
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Lauren Child, lauren@laurenchild.net
It is not one strength fits all. The agenda is very much one of control - use of finger sensors to regulate the force exerted; and the application of microprocessor based adaptive control of the functionality of the hand, through a command-based interface (rather than switch control, or proportional control). And lots of other great stuff, from neural network based pattern recognition of EMG signals, through to diagnostic links allowing users to change hand parameters via their PC.
Dunno about direct brain control. This hand is using EMG sensors measuring changes in resistance on the surface of the skin of the forearm, as muscles flex. There is work in Sweden on ossio-integration of prostheses ... attaching the prosthetic straight on to the bone; and direct electrical interfaces with nerve ends. Ossio-integration is nearer than useful nerve interfacing...
"Groovy" -- Ash
End of lesson. You may press the button.
The film on "Tomorrow's World" showed a boy using a game console with both his natural hand and the prostheses
These things are controlled by nerve impulses? That is pretty amazing! It must be difficult to get used to these, but for a person who has never had a hand it would be a lot easier to adapt too. If the children can do it very easy the adults should have not much more problems. Does this mean that bionic arms and legs are up soon? They can do intricate tasks and since they run off a motor the MUST have a power source, and what about typing and shit can they do that?
For now they can keep BOTH hands on the keyboard!
Apparently, you aren't. If you read the article, you would have realized that the link that you pointed to was not a self-contained bionic hand but was, instead, an externally, pneumatically-powered prosthesis.
The hand is one of *the* central parts of the body. So intimately connected to the brain is the hand, that it is more like an extension of a person's will. Upper limb loss is traumatic beyond belief. (Try keeping your dominant hand in your pocket and not using it for the next couple of days - you'll maybe start to understand.)
Mechanical prostheses are *very*limited, and often extremely uncomfortable to use. Myo-electric prostheses are - with few exceptions - primitive beyond belief.
Users of hands like ProDigits, the Utah hand, the Leverhume -Oxford hand, would (metaphorically) gladly take you outside and beat you to a pulp for uttering such a condiscending, ill-considered view.
You "just don't think its worth it" because you just don't know what you are talking about, and have not troubled yourself to apply the bare minimum of thought before mouthing off.
Huh? No vanity replacement of body parts?
What are breast implants and penile implants, then? Lots of people have them (around here, at least- Venice Beach, California).
Marc Siry || interactive media professional, motorcycle enthusiast ||
I saw this on the news last night. Cool technology for sure, but with a ghastly flesh-coloured plastic covering... ewww... If it were me I think just about anything would look better than a flesh-coloured rubber washing up glove. Five more fashionable ideas off top of my head (and I'm pretty much a lost cause fasion-wise): 1) no covering - gears and wires and motors visible. Might have problem with grit. 2) clear plastic - appeals to the youngster that has the clear plastic gameboy. 3) stainless steel - for the Terminator look 4) black leather glove - just cool 5) flesh-coloured plastic but custom-painted to match rest of arm and other hand. I noticed in the news story this little girl with one of the hands, grabbing on to her mother's finger. The girl was grinning with delight while her mother was going "oww! Let go now. oww! That actually hurts. oww! Let go !"
Fry for Who.
Kudos to science! Lets give these guys a hand
Capt. Ron
crazy dynamite monkey
Would it be possible to connect a third arm and train the brain to use that? I can think of many fields that would find this useful. Also the article does not say how it is powered, if you have to have an extention cord draging behind you, its not quite practicle.
-| My other ride is your mom |-
I wonder how much time will pass before someone somewhere starts using kids to grow them into crafty robocop-ish mechwarriors.
Think about it... If you can make a steel arm, how far behind is an ultimate soldier?
If you open yourself to the foo, You and foo become one.
maybe they have been improved, but they have been around for a long time.
The main benefit from this new type of prosthetic is that all of the opposing thumb movement mechanism is contained within the thumb itself. The main advantage of this is that people who have a partial hand can use this prosthetic because there is room to fit their existing hand inside it. Ironically, people in this position were actually at a greater disadvantage than those with no hand at all.
Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.
before we see professional athletes competing with bionic limbs, etc. The old days of playing Nintendo sports games with robots may not be far away, witness the AIBO soccer stuff, then this.. steadily getting closer.
:)
As long as they don't replace the cheerleaders.
BilldaCat
They also fail in that they are not built for normal use. I know, I've used one since about 1985. They break really easily. This new arm doesn't seem much different from the Otto Bock manufactured myoelectric arm I used to use (gold electrodes for picking up the right/left electrical signals from skin surface on arm). I'm not sure how 'new' this technology actually is, or in practice, the fact that they are rolling them out to kids. When the NHS switched to Steepers instead of Otto Bock for supply, the build quality seemed to suffer as well, I gave up using my myo a couple of years ago, (after 10 years using a 'bionic' arm on and off) as it was pretty impractical, battery life, random signals and motor ticks, uncomfortable socket fit, but I'm going to try again up at PMR, see what these 'new' ones are like.
sorry, i meant to put a big bahahahahaha at the end of that last one ;) .. gotta quit being so trigger happy on the "submit" ..
- j
now they just gotta finish building the rest of the body, and once we've got a bionic man and a bionic woman, there'll be a whole new meaning to cybersex...
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When I was in college, some 30 years ago, there was a guy who was trying to do precisely this. At the time, it was damn near all he could do to just define the problems he faced, and he didn't get very far. He was a pretty bright man, too.
People have been working on this for a long time; it's gradually gotten better, as the technologies have been developed and imported from other fields. It's actually getting useable now -- and that's a significant advance.
There's a world of difference between conceiving of a solution to a problem, and implementing it -- even if you manage to do both in the same detail.
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Politics is about making compromises. Religion isn't. --Michael Horton
"The unit is operated by nerve signals to the brain. The user sends a signal to move a muscle in the forearm, and electrodes detect this and pass the message on to the motors."
I wonder how well this works as previous robotic arms had problems with this as the arm did not make all the moves a real arm would ex raising a glass to drink out of.
Either way, this will help a lot of people...
British scientists have created he world's first truly 'bionic' hand small enough to be used by a toddler.
Later in the article, it says that they are going to build larger ones for adults, but it does not claim that these will be the first bionic hands for adults.
No, that definitly wasn't the show, but I do remember such a beast! Don't remember what it was, however. Not 'Electric Company,' I don't think. I do remember it, he would sit there and spin those damn rolls of TP. Maybe it was 321. I'll have to meditate on it.
To paraphrase Randal Graves from "Clerks"
Doesen't it feel good, knowing that you're right for a change? There's nothing more exhilarating than pointing out the shortcomings of others is there?
Capt. Ron
crazy dynamite monkey
Seen this on the BBC here in Ireland about 2 nights ago. The device is far from the holy
grail of bionic limbs. It has only one small motor with a wormwheel to open and close the "thumb" slowly. No other joints or digits or senses. Its being tested on children with partial hands and from what i seen they seem to adapt to it very quickly.
Hopefully this nerve hookup tech evolves quickly
to include feedback ( a really small bit of pain would be easy to produce from a pressure sensor for a _really_ crude hack as an indicator i suppose).
I seen one kid in a clip accidently crush his parents hands slightly.
Full feedback is still a bit far away
And I personally think all this robitic hand stuff is pointless. It is disgusting being connected to a piece of machinery. Sure, it might be useful once and a while -- but i just don't think its worth it.
I'm going to wait until they get the smartgun link as part of the package instead of optional.
While it's nice that the English will lay claim to this invention, I've seen this device around for many years. The Sabolich's showed a similar device on Oprah about 2 years back, plus I saw a demo of something similar in highschool (www.sabolich.com). Now where they seem to be laying claim to fame is not in the development of the mechanism or reading an impulse from the human operator but in making it "self contained". Seems like a little bit of a fishy statement, what exactly is "self contained"? The model that I saw several years ago was 'self contained' in my opinion, it had a small battery that fit into the unit and no external devices. Unfortunately the unit could only run for about 30 minutes on a charge. So what exactly have they 'invented' that hasn't been around for the past several years? Anyone know?
"Do not be swept up in the momentum of mediocrity." - anon
the integrated senses of hot/cold that I saw somewhere a while ago. I think it was on TV. Basically, there was a thermocouple in the fingertips that would trigger a heating/cooling unit at the top of the prosthetic, where existing nerves would pick it up. Response time was remarkably fast, enough so that someone touching the surface of, say, a stove would be able to respond quickly enough to avoid serious damage to the prosthetic. If anyone has a link, I'd appreciate it.
It may look like I'm doing nothing, but I'm actively waiting for my problems to go away.
--Scott Adams
That is pretty neat. But now that the hand is not limited by the body, as it is controlled by motors, what about the strenth of it. Is it one strentgh fits all, or does the user have the power to apply different amount of strengths? And, how strong could it be?
Have you read my journal today?
...one could actually make bionic legs for people who can't walk anymore due to nerve damage.
Now unfortunately we're restricted to dealing with individual _nerves_... People who have had spinal cord damage are in a worse situation, similar (but simpler, of course) to the ones who have lost vision due to a damaged optic nerve.
Some day we may know how to make neurons reproduce at an acceptable rate, but will we ever be able to attain precision high enough to, say, restore vision to acceptable standards?
The article doesn't mention nerve wear on their connections to subcutaneous electrodes, but that should be a point to consider as well.
Flavio
Yeah, I should have been more specific. It's already legal that people get mechanical replacements for defective organs and such - I can imagine, though, that doctors wouldn't be allowed to do what you call "vanity" replacements.
All in all, I think it's a good position - if I want to augment something, I want it to be done through genetics so it's permanent, and inherited(Yeah, I realize I wouldn't benefit, just my kids - but you get the idea).
Dave
'Round the firewall,
Out the modem,
Through the router,
Down the wire,
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
If they can do this, they should be able to soon have people able to control things that aren't normally part of the human body with their brains. It seems that the idea of dragoons in Starcraft (robots controlled by crippled warriors as if it was their body) is nearly possible.
in the exact same way that your fingers are.
The muscles that move your fingers are all in your forearm. Basically, the prosthetic has senses the muscle twitches in the forearm and uses that to trigger the motors which open/close the hand.
It may look like I'm doing nothing, but I'm actively waiting for my problems to go away.
--Scott Adams
Well, our nervous system seems to help us respond to dangers, such as placing your hand in a dangerously hot area, the body responds and the hand moves. I wonder if getting the hand to have some form of feedback would be the next step.
Have you read my journal today?
________
They have had bionic arms with motor controled fingers on them for ages, and they do have ones with pressure sensitivity and thermocouples built in. Thats not the big deal here. The point is that these hand units are self contained, i.e theres no HIGE battery pack held in a big false arm thing that weighs a tonne; its all in the hand, so to speak ;-)
If they can move their finger with enough accuracy, they could surely move a computer cursor...
Despite not having a real hand, being able to control a computer or another device by thought could prove to be very useful and practical.
two, in fact.
I saw an article on the BBC's Tomorrow's World which showed someone being fitted with electrodes in the outer part of his brain which formed a matrix (of about 8x8 pixels, I think). Hooked up to a video camera, this allowed the recipient to 'see', albeit in rather low-resolution monochrome. It was an experiment rather than a recognised procedure, though. Does anyone else remember this or know anything else about it?
With this criteria everything is operated with "signals from the brain". I send a signal to move a muscle in my hand, that is detected by my computer keyboard that
MOD THE CHILD UP!
There is more good stuff about - not sure how much is in ProDigit - such as better acquisition of EMG signals; use of sensors within the hand to augment the control function (e.g. incipient slip sensors which can tighten the grip without user intervention); adaptive control for different grip postures - precision, power and prehension...
Power is still a major issue; equally we all know battery technology has come on in bounds in the last ten years, and shaped batteries offer the prospect of further diminshing the package size.
One poster talked nonsense about "the indignity of being strapped to a machine". Roughly 102,000 persons in the US (251 M inhabitants = 1 in 2460) have absence or loss of an upper extremity. Myo-prosthesis are suitable for about 41,000 of them. In the western world, the market is about 132,000. Most users have had years of being supplied with crap prosthetics. ProDigits and its ilk *majorly* improve the functional capabilites of their users, & the work of David Gow and the PMR team is to be welcomed.
I just wanted to make the joke at the end. Sorry if I offended you. :(
It may look like I'm doing nothing, but I'm actively waiting for my problems to go away.
--Scott Adams
My girlfriends call me a cab. Oh wait, now I get it.
Pete
How is this different from myoelectric arms? Is there more accuracy, or what?
Or as opposed to being a neato-thing for the rich, you maintain that robotic body part replacements are ONLY available in place of damaged/destroyed parts. Doctors could still get in trouble for vanity replacements.
So if you have catastrophic heart failure, you can get an artificial heart, but you can't get one if your heart is fine, or get that new arm should you end up getting your old one diced off. And just as good, it'll look (hopefully) a lot like your old one, same fleshtones, hair, and everything.
I remember very clearly back in elementary school when a one-armed man came to demonstrate for the class a robotic arm which responded to electrical signals to work the fingers, and also demonstrated a "hook" type arm operated by straps.
He told us we'd rather have the robotic arm if we needed one, because it would make us look like everyone else, and I remember thinking that I'd want it because it was cool, and seemed to be much more convenient.
I'm sure the effectiveness and appearance has come a long way since then, but for certain, the idea isn't new. Someday, we'll have true cyborg quality completely indistinguishable from the real thing.
I wonder if eventually far in the future, some people will have perfectly good hands or arms replaced for the added speed and strength of a robot equivalent.
________
It was a show that was on PBS for quite some time. As I no longer watch television I can't say whether it's still on the air.
The point of this is that I clearly remember seeing just this device on one of their episodes. I was just as was described on this web site, but this show aired at least ten years ago, but I believe more than that. I believe that the significance of this is that it's small enough for kids now instead of just adults.
Wow.
There was a big part of me that was afraid to look at the comments in the article; fearing million dollar man and Ash jokes would take the day. I was little prepared for the sprinklings from near and far over jokes about geek culture icons.
Anywhere else it would be wow, cool. Here is is time for bad puns & in group references.
I guess I am glad I looked after all.
~~ What's stopping you?
This reminds me of that old commercial with a robot flipping through gears like a gymnist, and getting it's arm severed by some kind of immense rotating saw blade. Then the line, "I am a robot - I can put my arm back on - you can't. play safe." Hmmm....wonder how many children in the future will disregard safety becuase of advances like these... But what will be *really* cool is when they get to the point where instead of attaching mechanics to flesh, they attach flesh to mechanics. I'd really like to have a cyborg body.....then I can crush the puny humans like the vermin they are!!
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Society has traditionally always tried to find scapegoats for its problems. Well, here I am.
The bionic hand is not really such a huge advance in BioTech. I don't want to sound rude, but this is nothing more that just an small advance in a huge medical effort. Since the 70's, some robotic extremities have been engineered. I remember watching mechanical Legs and Arms have been on "Believe it or not" since the 80's, just that those where less developed and attractive to the eye. I would suggest that this advance is not really a huge step in medicine, but just the normal advance of the HighTech practice which is manufacturing all kind stuff even smaller. This bionic hand is to old protesis what a Palm VII is to an Commodore 64 with modem... it is nothing more that the same principle with some extra time of technological advance...
Imagine the past, remember the future - Carlos Fuentes