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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."
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.)
> 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"
Does it make that cool SIx-million dollar man/bionic woman/wonder woman sound effect when the hand is used?
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.
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.
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
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.
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?
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.
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
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
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
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.
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
I can think of many fields that would find this useful.
Ski Boxing for a start. Now about that extra head...
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?
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.)
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?
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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.
Especialy if done as an adult, this would be quite difficult. Once you hit a certain age, your brain gets a lot more set in its ways, and maybe most importantly- it already has a complete coherent "body image"- making additions to it is a HUGE change. While it certainly could reallocate some neurons to control this third arm (often done when brain damage victims relearn tasks they lost when the part of the brain that contorlled them was damaged), they would be really sloppy and awkward even after tons and tons of practice. A child could certainly learn a third arm, though of course it would have difficultly because it would hav no human models to imitate in the use of it (but since it'd be pretty similar to other arms, that wouldn't be a major problem) I did remember a story in the New Yorker about a totally paralyzed guy who could move a mouse on the computer screen just by thinking about it. They simply put a switch in his brain in the part that used to control his wrist functions, read the simple and generalized movement impulses, and translated it into x and y movement for the program it was hooked up to. REALLY neat. Think of how this could change human society if everyone grew up with such embedded switches that they learned to use, and that could be put to a myriad of tasks outside of our own body motion!
I think you're thinking of the blind man who got a chip implanted in his retina that allowed him to at least see rough shape outlines as an array of points. Pretty cool, that.
"If ignorance is bliss, may I never be happy.
-- Veni, vidi, dormivi
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.
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