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Brain Interface Lets Monkeys Control Prosthetic Limbs
himicos was one of many readers to point out one recent success of scientists working to develop working brain-machine interfaces, writing "A team at the university of Pittsburgh has finally advanced a 2002 technology enough for use in prosthetic limbs, the targeted application all along. Training computer models to the firing patterns of the neurons in the parts of the brain that control motion, they are able to project the intentions of a monkey to a robotic arm, which follows the will of the animal.
The sad thing about the articles is that the beauty of the mathematics used to create and train the models is totally ignored." Reader phpmysqldev adds a link to coverage at the BBC, and writes "This of course brings significant hope to amputees and other other people with physical disabilities." (Note that this research has been going on for quite some time.)
Those who believe the Internet is private,
find their privates are on the Internet.
Get your stinkin paws off me, you damned dirty ape!
I want my datajack already! I've got essense to burn.
if/when we invent lightsabers, we should have the robotic limb problem solved. other than that, this should help paralyzed people move again
If people can get past, can they get future? Best way to confuse a stoner
Would the OP or someone else in the community care to take a moment to explain the beauty of the math for us non math-majors?
How about custom appendages? If the brain can be trained to independently control a new arm, why couldn't it learn to control a genuine Doctor Octopus suit?
It should be illegal to say that freedom of speech should be limited.
So ... I realize that this will ultimately be adapted to humans, but could it be adapted to something else?
...
...
Specifically, I'm thinking of adapting a laser prosthetic arm, to be used by the poor, armless sharks
It's just an idea
Tie two birds together: although they have four wings, they cannot fly. (The blind man)
I've got 1,000 of these smelly bastards sitting in a room full of typewriters, and NOT ONE of them has produced the works of Shakespeare yet.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
if i were unfortunate enough to be an amputee, i would not like a monkey to be operating my prosthetic limbs.
This of course brings significant hope to amputees and other other people with physical disabilities.
Yes, if you are depressed because you can't walk, you can now be cheered up by watching cybermonkeys fling faeces at each other with ever greater velocity!
That's nothing, I know tons of girls like Rogue, that can steal your powers by touching you.
stuff |
>>This of course brings significant hope to amputees
As long as they don't mind carrying a monkey to control their prosthetic arm...
that my (special) hands can work for me while I am on a vacation?
They called me mad, and I called them mad, and damn them, they outvoted me. -Nathaniel Lee
So many science stories on /. appeared months ago on Daily planet (www.discoverychannel.ca/dailyplanet). Since people here are clearly incapable of reading an article, maybe people should watch the show and then be ready to discuss the story when it appears here (without even reading the article).
Now the infinite number of monkeys will only need to *think* about Hamlet.
Monkeys, mind-control, robots, maths and electronics
-- just what is this doing on Slashdot?
[% slash_sig_val.text %]
This is the kind of research they want to stop.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
The monkey in the pictures had his own arms restrained within tubes so that he/she would be forced to use the mechanical arm in order to get the marshmallow, and the mechanical arm isn't oriented so that the monkey could possibly mistake it for his/her own arm. I can't help but wonder what the monkey's opinion of all this is. It's got to be more than a little confusing.
Almost in time for our war with largest incident of severed limbs due to IED's.
I knew a guy in college who was working in this field. He went on to do master's work at Cornell. Incidentally he had no arms.
This will be great to improve the standard of living for many of the returning soldiers.
Eschew Obfuscation
Don't forget to always mount a scratch monkey.
I'm hardly an animal rights advocate, but has anyone stopped to ask what sort of ethics has us cracking open a monkey's head to perform these experiments?
This is my sig.
Get back to me when they can use the robotic arm to fling poo.
Sweet, that's a definite big step. So, when can we start having Angelic Layer tournaments? (For the likely great number of you unfamiliar with the series, imagine "mentally controlled kung-fu action figures." Sure as hell beats Magic: The Gathering and Halo tournaments.)
Miguel Nicolelis is doing this kind of job and seems to be much more advanced. http://www.thinkartificial.org/machine-interfaces/monkey-brain-makes-robot-walk/ He actually made a monkey in the US control a robot in Japan by walking on a treadmill. The monkey had a screen showing the robot. After realizing that she (the monkey) could actually move the robot by thinking, she developed in her brain something that enabled her to control the robot and not have to walk herself. Thus, she could earn the rewards and not have to spend her energy. Very interesting stuff.
How long until one of these monkeys kills the scientists with his robotic arm, in retaliation for them removing his perfectly good arm?
Anything you say will be held against you.
Back in the early 80s there was major buzz about using computers to restore movement to people paralyzed by spinal injuries. In a nutshell, a computer would send properly sequenced jolts to the person's leg muscles, enabling them to walk. In tests this more or less worked. The electronics at the time were too big to make it practical but the hope was that in the future (now) computers would be portable and powerful enough to do the job. I recall a number of hopeful reports on "60 Minutes" regarding this research, and even a TV movie about the researcher leading the effort. But all this seems to have fallen off the radar.
Anyone have the straight dope on this research? Because if it does work it stands to reason that if a person could control an artificial limb with their thoughts controlling real limbs would also be possible.
Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
(Brain Interface Lets Monkeys Control Prosthetic Limbs) + (New Robots Developed to Climb Walls) + (U.S. Plan for "Thinking Machines" Repository)
*sigh*
I, for one, welcome our new U.S. monkey brain controlled wall climbing robotic thinking machine overlords.
This isn't as easy as it used to be...
Clumsy movements at best. The monkey grabs the marshmallow by moving its head instead of really using its prosthesis. It looks like it has only one degree of freedom. Still, a good achievement but nowhere near what is needed for a tree cyborg body :-)
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
That's why humans are making this instead of leaving it up to God.
The perfect butler!
How are we going to attach a monkey with robot a robot arm to our torsos?
I wouldn't want a monkey brain to control *my* prothetic limb!
"In experiments published in the June 7 issue of the journal Science, monkeys were able to move balls around in 3D space on a computer screen just by thinking about it"
i can move balls around in 3d space just by thinking about stuff, too. don't ask "what" stuff - that's a trade secret. ok, ok.. i'll give you a hint: it rhymes with prom and born.
This post totally made my morning. I salute you!
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
This was already done in 2001 (the year, not the movie): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1ZGIrNf71Q
They used a monkey controlling prosthetic human limbs before.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YB08leFMRnM
I, for one, welcome our new Robotic Arm Poo-Flinging Monkey Overlords
Real-life tentacle hentai may finally be made possible!
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
I have no idea what possibly goes on after this step.
I don't know what would go after this step either, but the one after that would be Profit!!!
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Phase two will end up something like this: http://www.theonion.com/content/node/39133
3 degrees of separation from Vladimir Putin
I think that if I had a prosthetic limb I'd be very wary of letting monkeys control it.
Quick! Attach one to a dog so he can finally make a fist!!!
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
I saw this technology on a video on either TLC or Discovery SEVERAL years ago. The monkey could move a robotic arm with its brain waves. Old news. On the same episode, they showed a fella moving a cursor on a computer screen with the same technique. Also cool, on that episode, was a prosthetic leg for a guy who had his amputated above the knee. They bolted a titanium socket into his femur that protruded out of the bottom of his "nub" that could "jack" into the prosthetic knee and leg. He could, in some fashion, sense touch on the prosthetic (vibrations or something up into his real leg).
No single raindrop believes it is to blame for the flood.
it's for FIGHTING TERRORISM!
Surely that's good for a coupla hundred mil. Just making IED detecting appendages should double that figure.
They ARE out to get you simply because They are in it for themselves and they don't care about you.
A common argument is that although scientifically questionable, such devices pose an interesting engineering problem that has a very useful purpose (i.e. helping paralyzed people). That is fine, but if you ask a paralyzed person, what they want is to control their bowels, blatter and sexual function far more than their arms.
There's only one problem with their approach: you can't leave the electrodes in long-term. Scar tissue forms after a few weeks, and then it's surgery time.
Non-invasive approaches are where the big money is.
"Monkey Business" to me.
...
This might be useful to the men who have been "Lorena Bobbitized". Any man who has been or will be 'Lorena Bobbitized' can be outfitted with this '*ickhead apparatus' and be forgiven for using one head to MANipulate, make CONgress and PROgresr with his lower brain, and in his case, scex will no longer be a 'no-brainer'...
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
What comes after this, after "Profit", is well... umm,
# MONKEY BUSINESS...
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Kong Army?
As for another post "How about custom appendages? If the brain can be trained to independently control a new arm, why couldn't it learn to control a genuine Doctor Octopus suit?".... I'm going out on a LIMB here.... But...
Is that headed toward Dr. StrangeLove, or Dr. StrangeGlove?....
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
I guess I should of quit smoking when I lost my arm...
..."Robotic Arm Controls Monkey Brain."
The really cool thing that they're totally missing is that prosthetic limbs aren't limited to replacements.
Research has shown that the brain has the ability to handle additional limbs and/or senses. So if an amputee can learn to control a replacement arm, then a normal person could also learn to control an extra pair of arms. The neat thing is that the brain would just adapt to it and it would seem natural.
William Gibbons' Cyber-Simian
8==8 Bones 8==8
"Bow to your cybernetic monkey overlords!"
Gives new meaning to the term.
"The sad thing about the articles is that the beauty of the mathematics used to create and train the models is totally ignored."
The sadder thing is that the discovery of response patterns of amputated limbs being mapped to other parts of the body is totally ignored.
A man had his arm removed. A psychiatrist attending happened to note that the man claimed to "feel" things in his missing hand when other parts of his body were touched. After careful mapping, three different response maps were found -- one each on his arm, chest and back. Each was so sensitive that individual fingers could be stimulated and he could correctly tell which.
This major discovery in neural plasticity makes it totally unnecessary to try to decode signals from electrode either drilled through the skull, or else placed on the surface and reading signals though the scalp, skull and dura mater, which reduces the signal by 3 orders of magnitude. Either way, these signals require some massive processing because a significant command/response signal (ie. an electrical response representing a single Hebbian cellular assembly that can be clearly decoded to an intent as stated in the article) comes from 0.3% to 3% of the neurons in the region being detected, the vast majority of the signal needing rejection as false positive or noise. Using the mapped response regions allows for signal analysis based on EMG patterns that are not expected at all in the area under the electrodes, making detection and analysis trivial.
TFA and most such research is not about giving amputees mobility. It is about decoding and using neural signals. If it were about the former, easier ways would have been used and the job already accomplished. It is about the latter because such things make more news, get more recognition, and therefore result in more grant application success.
The resulting technology will only be applied to prosthetics as a secondary result. Its primary use will be in such as hands-off controls for fighter pilots (see Clint Eastwood's "Firefox" for your obligatory Slashdot sci-fi/movie reference), tank crews and mobile missile launchers. Maybe this is the saddest part of all, but ignoring a more certain path to success as far as prosthetics is a sad piece.
Also sad, with a touch of irony, is the fact that the weaponry applications will be untenable because of the heuristic nature of neural processing -- getting it close but error prone will be fast, getting it right will be no faster or require less effort than hand operated controls. The slow speed and so the ability to use real-time perceptual feedback with prosthetics will make that far more successful. It remains to be seen whether after the war applications fail the research continues (ie. there is adequate funding offered) with respect to prosthetics. If someone like the US Veterans Administration picks it up when DARPA drops it, it might. I'm not hopeful.
The portion of the above that's assertion or opinion is based on the same professional experience as the portion that's not. That experience includes development of some of the "beautiful" maths decried as being ignored. Having been prosthetic-wrist deep in the research and from both directions, I find that a minor point to consider as "sad".
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
There is talk about clinical trials on people using this technology. I'm very interested about the feedback they can give, although I suspect it will be something like 'I just move it, I don't know how, dammit'. Now, what would happen if you connect this BMI to an artificial neural network...would it be incorporated by the brain? Sounds like a nice thing to tinker with...connecting software interfaces to other stuff (cams, mics, calculators, whatever) and see what happens. What happens if you attach it to a distributed neural network ? Oh dear, Skynet is human after all :)
- there are no frogs here
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yTrP9HQsUuk
so why not 3 arms?
I can't speak specifically about this research without reading the paper, but mathematical transformations in similar studies have used surprisingly simple linear algorithms. It turns out very little work needs to be done to turn the neural data into something useful: just pick arbitrary thresholds for movement in different degrees of freedom, and the motor cortex reorganizes itself.
While this technology is totally cool, this isn't exactly new news.
IIRC Duke University published a study some years back with monkeys and joysticks controlled through a neural interface.
Japan and Germany both have some pretty neat stuff in the works as well, and there are several end-user products that are supposed to be coming to market soon.
Of course, this is just the start, and nobody is doing neural feed-back yet, but it is still very exciting to the Gibson fan in me.
While I think this research is excellent news, I have to wonder what happened to the monkey's original arm... did they cut it off so that they could do this research? how evil...
I was so hoping this was going to be "Brain Interface Lets Monkeys Control Prostitutes" when I saw the live bookmark
But we're talking about a technology that could give millions of kids back something akin to the legs they had blown off from landmines. People who are blind and crippled after suffering years of diabetes being able to walk again. Mothers being able to lift their kids again. Anyone who talks about the beauty of maths in this situation just doesn't get it. Science, like any human endeavour, is first and foremost about people.
For you Anime fans, check out 'Angelic Layer' if you haven't done so already. If only life imitated fiction we'd all be controlling mini robots ;)
I don't want to go all PETA or anything, I love food animals and the way their meat tastes, but this is just exceedingly assinine:
"The sad thing about the articles is that the beauty of the mathematics used to create and train the models is totally ignored."
I would have thought the sad part of the article is that we're still experimenting on live animals, presumably with some sort of horrible animal torture going on. Yes, there are tremendous benefits from this research. Yes, there is also a cost. And that cost is not, believe or not, that we might "miss some beautiful mathematics".
I am government man, come from the government. The government has sent me. -- G.I.R.
We've been sticking electrodes into brains for ages. It's great to see medical applications come out of it, but it's not a fundamentally paradigm-shifting technology. The really interesting stuff is this. Look Ma, no electrodes!
Now that each monkey has +1 limb, it means that we need only INF/3 monkeys.
The saddest poem