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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 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.
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
--
Lauren Child, lauren@laurenchild.net
"Groovy" -- Ash
End of lesson. You may press the button.
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
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
Ouch. I'd certainly hate to suffer a decapitating injury. However, I would be very impressed if someone wasn't hindered by the loss. Actually, come to think of it, a few of the people I know probably wouldn't be hindered by the loss.
It may look like I'm doing nothing, but I'm actively waiting for my problems to go away.
--Scott Adams
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 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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