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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!"
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".
I just want one of these things that interfaces with my computer as a Bluetooth HID. Think of it: mousing without having to lift your hands from the keyboard! And you only have to sacrifice the use of some vestigial muscle.
Really, if they can figure out how to key this thing off of that muscle that wiggles your ears, we could even maintain that classic bluetooth douchebag look by having something clipped on to our ears all the time.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
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.
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.
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".
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.
Yes it does!
When you are born you don't control the "bits you were born with" very well, you have to learn that.
It takes from for a baby to crawl, toddle, walk, run.
It takes more time to learn to do such things with accuracy, and more complicated control takes more time again - professional athletes and sports players are not born with the ability, it's is learnt through training and practice, which does exactly what the parent suggests.
If you are 30, then you have had 30 years "teaching yourself" to use all of the bits you were born with. So don't expect to learn new prosthesis (or other devices) to the same level of competency in a few weeks.
The challenge is making these things easy to learn to a 'useful' competency in a very short period; but actual competency would rise with more usage, and ultimately it could very easily exceed your skill with other parts of the body.
I would expect that an implanted 'mouse/keyboard interface' would be used much more competently than the limbs by someone that spends all day using it to interface with computers; likewise, I would expect an athlete to use the limbs much more competently than the computer interface.