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."

Comments

missed the point - its for people w/ partial hands

[lkchild]

I think you guys have missed the point

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

I wonder if these prosthetics also have...

[dmatos]

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.

Re:This is so cool

[dmatos]

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.

Prodigit vs other my-electric hand prostheses

[tagishsimon]

The major differece between ProDigit and previous hand prosthetics is that the motors and gearbox are housed in the finder, not in the palm area of the hand. I *think* the other major difference is that ProDigit has a curling finger action, whilst conventional myo-electric prostheses tend to have a prehensile grip in which the fingers do not curl. The hand has a more anthropomorphic design, in that the thumb abducts across the palm - conventional myos tend to have a straight opposing thumb.

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.

they have had these for ages

[Bad_CRC]

maybe they have been improved, but they have been around for a long time.

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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