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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."
Teen male amputees will tell their peers "Try using the left side of your brain, it feels like somebody else!"
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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.
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The question is would technology get to a point where our brains will interact better with machines then they do with our own bodies. Being that technology advances faster then evolution I could see it coming. I just hope they come with low power USB ports so I don't need a keyboard anymore.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I have two bio arms, but I would be quite like having a third arm I could control as naturally as my other two. This would be especially useful when using emacs.
All this brain interface stuff is a dead end direction for amputees. Put the focus on stem cell limb regeneration. The US Army is behind it because it will be cheaper than wheelchairs and veteran's hospitals. http://www.imminst.org/forum/index.php?showtopic=26506
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Now guys, just be careful not to mention that eventually this brain controlled arm could be used to masturbate or wield a gun since that would get the pubs and dems to cut funding respectively.:-)
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They've had this in rough form for a while now. But recent advancements have resulted in a 65% reduction in incidents of the prosthetic arm attempting to strangle the user to death.
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If you RTFS, you'll see that that article you link to was the pilot project with one person, and that this is a slightly larger project with several (TFA doesn't say how many) people.
I'm actually a little surprised that this work wasn't done years ago; especially given what we know about synaptic plasticity.
If there's a neurobiologist reading this, could you use this technique to wire one side of a person's body to the other, enabling a person who has had a stroke to regain movement? (I think wires would bypass damaged nerves, and could fire motorneurons in the paralyzed side directly, as these are still functional even after a stroke. Or am I way off base?)
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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.
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This procedure moves nerves from the arms into the chest. The areas of the brain that control (one side of) the chest are still functional in a stroke, at least enough to get some rudimentary movement. Based on what I know of synaptic plasticity, I think the brain might be able to rewire "chest" motor cortex neurons to be "arm" neurons, eventually restoring decent range of motion.
My question is whether they can bypass the damaged brain ares by moving nerves (it seems to me that TFA suggests yes).
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If you RTFS, you'll see that that article you link to was the pilot project with one person, and that this is a slightly larger project with several (TFA doesn't say how many) people.
Yes, but no new breakthroughs have been made. The only thing that's been proven is that the original subject, Jesse Sullivan, was not an isolated case and the procedure is repeatable. Even taking that into consideration, Claudia Mitchell had this procedure done in almost three years ago.
The only real news here is that the work is being submitted to the FDA.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
Question; I'm a little vague as to why the nerves have to be moved to healthy muscle tissue? Is it because there are currently no sensors that can read impulses directly from the nerves themselves, and require muscle contraction to 'amplify' the signal?
My question is whether they can bypass the damaged brain ares by moving nerves (it seems to me that TFA suggests yes).
What Dr. Kuiken's technique does is analogous to disconnecting a parallel cable from a broken printer and connecting it to a new one. Doing this won't help if the computer is broken.
To do what you are suggesting requires taking the case of the computer (brain surgery), to do some rewiring.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
You might want to rephrase that....
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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.)
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1. They have the luxury of editing to find the best looking trials. I'm sure these don't work as well as they seem. But as a person with a background in psychology, I suspect that after a few hundred hours of using them, these people would have excellent control over them.
2. Picking up the cracker... How do wash these fingers? They're going to need food gloves for them.
3. Is there a nice break between the arm and the pickups on the body? Is there a radio link between that stub and the arm? There needs to be, because any shock to the arm could hurt those connections. Accidental bumping, firm handshakes, etc. Though if there is a radio-based break, and jarring doesn't stop the arm, then the arm can be firmly attached to a brace around the whole body with a counterweight, and the next step is cyborg kung foo.
>>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.
A neat thing about the brain is its incredible ability to rewire itself in response to changes in usage. The section of your brain dedicated to sight, for example, is used to process sound in blind people. Even sighted people, when deprived of all light, begin remapping their brain in this fashion after about a week or so. When exposed to light again, they literally can't see (or not very well at all) until another week has gone by and the functional map is restored. In the meantime, they 'see sound' and have various other interesting things happen to them.
DEKA has been doing this for some time now. http://www.engadget.com/2008/05/29/dean-kamens-luke-arm-now-has-mind-control-and-3d-spatial-interf/
Thats Ok, but I think this is better http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/industry/4224764.html?series=37 of course I'm not exactly unbiased.
We already control more limbs than we're born with.
;) ).
;) ).
:).
Try using a mouse to control a pointer in a GUI.
Next, use a mouse to control a character in an FPS game.
Next, use a mouse to control little creatures in an RTS game.
After enough practice, when you do all of that do you actually think of where you move your arm, hands and fingers?
You don't. You just think of controlling some extension of yourself.
Same for typing, using a screwdriver, etc.
Same goes for driving car. If you drive a car, next time observe that your hands move near subconsciously to turn the steering wheel so as to satisfy your intention that your car stays in its lane (well that is if you're one of those drivers who can stick to one lane
Why do you think most people have handedness? For most people learning to use a tool with the "other" hand is almost like learning to use a new tool all over again. It's not really a matter of "right" or "left", it's a matter of "different". Most people can't "flip" the "learnt mapping" to the other hand easily (which is what being ambidextrous is).
The dominant hand usually gets first choice in learning to use a tool. It doesn't necessarily mean your your "nondominant" hand is less "skilled", it is likely to be better at some things than your dominant hand (like using the other side of the keyboard
On the other hand, there are some people like Nadal who is righthanded but learnt to play tennis with his left hand just to have an advantage
It will.
The sort of thing they were doing in this experiment is to use a different part of the brain to control stuff.
Like learning to drive a car, this is learning to drive your prosthetic hand with your chest muscles.
You can use a mouse with either hand, and you can use it to control a gun/character that's not real in some game. If you have to, you could learn to use the mouse with your foot.
So using some other part of your body to control a prosthetic hand isn't far fetched.
Can I get a citation on that? I've heard of it several times before, but have failed on finding it...
I see that this project still involves the kludge of having sensors reading muscle contractions, rather than a direct interface between the leftover nerves and a nerve-sensor of some kind. A direct connection makes more sense if you can make it work, partly because it allows for sensation as well as motion.
Is there more research going on in that direction? It seemed as though DARPA's "Proto" arm series was moving towards a direct nerve interface.
Meanwhile, human hand transplants have had some success at establishing two-way nerve connections between nerves that weren't originally part of the same body. (Actually the info readily available isn't clear on the "two-way" part.) So, the theory that you can basically "hook up the wires" and have a working replacement limb seems proven; it's just not practical yet.
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I'm a little disappointed by that aspect though (see comment below). It seems like a direct nerve link is more elegant, and more likely to restore sensation. Hopefully the research will get to that phase at some point. Human hand transplants seem to prove that hooking up nerves to after-market hardware is possible.
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The only real news here is that the work is being submitted to the FDA.
Correction: That should be, "The only real news here is that the work is being published by JAMA." I guess being submitted to the FDA was just wishful thinking on my part.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
That's usually called driving.
Really, it sounds like you are looking forward to putting your brain in a vat of goo. Have fun.
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The Brain that Changes Itself is a good reference on this.
http://www.normandoidge.com/normandoidge/MAIN.html
Like learning to drive a car, this is learning to drive your prosthetic hand with your chest muscles.
No. It's not. This is re-wiring the nerve that used to control your arm, which you no longer have, so that it instead activates muscles in your chest. The muscle contractions in your chest then directly correlate to arm movements that you thought you performed, and the electronics in the prosthetic pick up those muscle contractions and translate them into the corresponding arm motion.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.