A New Robotic Hand That Can "Feel"

Dyne09 writes "The BBC is running a video report about a group of Swiss and Italian scientists who have created the 'Smart Hand,' a robotic hand with forty sensors that 'connect directly to the brain.' Though fuzzy on the details, the report says the hand provides sensor feedback to a willing test subject, a 22-year-old man who lost his hand to cancer three years ago. How long until we have access to Star Wars-esque robotic limbs?"

Comments

One word

[SpinyNorman]

Telepresenceporn

Re:One word

[FlyingSquidStudios]

If I had a robotic hand, there are certain parts of my- and other people's- bodies that I would be very reluctant to touch, squeeze or otherwise pleasure with it. It's all fine and dandy until one of the hydraulic lines breaks and someone needs a new set of genitals.

Re:One word

[cjfs]

And you thought buffer overflows were scary before...

Re:One word

[EdIII]

You do realize that the vast majority of young impressionable girls you would be meeting on the Internet to have telepresenceporn sessions with, would in fact be, older perverted men.

It's going to be dudes manipulating your junk. DUDES. Even if you go for the paid-for telepresenceporn of supposedly higher quality you will most likely still get dudes manipulating your junk. They will be outsourced foreign dudes touching your junk.

One word - Dudes.

Re:I wonder at some point if people will stop "dyi

[MBGMorden]

Eventually it may be possible that the brain itself could be replaced with an artificial unit (and our conciousness "Transeferred"). At that point though I'd say that you wouldn't really have the same person left. Just a simulation of that person. Or as Dr. Bashir put it in one episode of DS9 (Star Trek had artificial brains):

Nerys, if I remove the rest of his brain... put a machine in its place... he may look like Bareil... and he may even talk like Bareil... but it won't be Bareil. The "spark of life" will be gone. He'll be dead. And I'll be the one who killed him.

Indeed if we ever moved to that point, there would be no need for the rest of the artificial organs. Most of that stuff serves one ultimate goal - keep the brain running. If the brain itself were powerable by electricity then it would make sense to eliminate the other inefficient biological parts and just plug the new artificial brain into a completely artificial body.

Dean Kamen's robotic arm?

[hooeezit]

This technology is only a subset of the prosthetic arm - 'Luke' - developed by Dean Kamen's company. The prosthetic arm is controlled directly by the user's brain as well and allows a lot more complexity compared to the hand shown here. Also, Luke is being built as a modular system where you only use the parts of the arm that you need - if you don't need the upper arm, you can use just the hand and lower arm, and so forth.
More details below:

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2008/05/dean-kamens-rob/
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/biomedical/bionics/dean-kamens-luke-arm-prosthesis-readies-for-clinical-trials/2
http://blog.ted.com/2008/02/dean_kamens_arm.php

PS: For those who can't place the name, Dean Kamen is the inventor of Segway, among other things.

Interesting .. but....

[tkjtkj]

Cancer below the elbow or below the knee is medically unheard of ...