Slashdot Mirror
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!"
Trolling is a art,
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".
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.
Sure. But until stem cell therapy gets past the ground stages, this is nice. Hell, who knows... they might even be able to adapt it so people could control more limbs than they're born with.
Using your analogy, we shouldn't have done any development on steam engines since internal combustion engines would be so much better and just needed some more research.
Second point, robotics engineers are not cellular biologists. You can't just "divert resources" like that.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
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.:-)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
Me, I'm just waiting in this mud hut until we have star travel so I can move to a nicer place on another planet.
Dead end? Having a prosthetic limb which can be controlled as if it was your own lost limb certainly doesn't seem like a "dead end". Tech that we have now is always superior to tech that we might probably get sometime in the future — right up until such a time as we have the newer, better tech. This experiment might just be proof-of-concept, but it looks relatively close to being user-ready (as opposed to limb regeneration, which holds promise but who knows when we'll actually be able to do it).
By that reasoning, I'd refuse to upgrade from dial-up until they ran a fibre link to my home.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
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.
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?
You might want to rephrase that....
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
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.
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
Can I get a citation on that? I've heard of it several times before, but have failed on finding it...