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New Success For Brain-Controlled Prosthetic Arm
An anonymous reader writes "A number of amputees are now using a prosthetic arm that moves intuitively, when they think about moving their missing limb. Todd Kuiken and colleagues at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago surgically rearrange the nerves that normally connect to the lost limb and embed them in muscles in the chest. The muscles are then connected to sensors that translate muscle movements into movement in a robotic arm. The researchers first reported the technique in a single patient in 2007, and have now tested it in several more. The patients could all successfully move the arm in space, mimic hand motions, and pick up a variety of objects, including a water glass, a delicate cracker, and a checker rolling across a table. (Three patients are shown using the arm in the related video.) The findings are reported today in Journal of the American Medical Association."
I've been following Dr. Kuiken's technique for quite a while. Here's a video of a speech he gave a year ago with his first successful candidate Jesse Sullivan.
Interesting stuff none the less.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
Strokes are caused by brain damage from oxygen deprivation, not by nerve damage. If the portion of your brain that's supposed to control your left hand is fried, the sort of thing they were doing in this experiment won't help you.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
I think what he's saying is, the half of the motherboard with the parallel port is fried, but you can plug in a USB printer and the computer will figure out a driver on it's own. (The USB port being the chest muscles on the working side of the body/brain, and the parallel port being the dead side of the brain, and the printer being the still working fine muscles on teh dead side of the body.)
-- All your booze are belong to us.
Basically, yes. Sensing muscle activity is way easier/less noisy than picking up nerve impulses and the muscle action provides feedback to the nerves, which encourages them not to atrophy.