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Woman Wants To Replace Her Non-functioning Hand With a Bionic Prosthesis
erice writes about the case of Nicola Wilding: "Injured in crash which damaged the nerves in her arm, she has reached the limits that can what be accomplished with nerve transplants. She can move her arm but doctors have given up hope of restoring use of her hand. So she wants doctors to amputate the hand and replace it with a bionic version that does work."
The doctor, Oskar C. Aszmann, first performed a similar operation last year.
Why not?
And it was also covered by the BBC.
In soviet russia the government regulates the companies.
..the hand-decap then. Would someone just lend the poor woman a hand already?
you're cut off.
insensitive clod overlords obligatory xkcd car analogy russian reversals whoosh pedant fanbois ftfy in 3...2...1..PROFIT
I'd give myself the stranger every day
In other news, DARPA announced the first functional light saber ...
Where are the visionary rich when it comes to biotech?
Hiring patent lawyers. At least if Monsanto is any indication.
See, the problem is that this bionic hand can't cross-pollinate with natural hands and produce new lawsuits. Fix that and there will be bionic hands for everyone who wants them.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
That's not the comparison she gets to make. Her options are a human hand that doesn't work, a hook, or a "toy robot hand." She doesn't get to wait for future technologies that might never come to apss.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
She doesn't look a thing like Lindsay Wagner.
#DeleteChrome
Another lame slashdot summary linking to a lame article. EVERYONE knows the man's name is Oscar Goldman.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
Cutting off the hand is rather final.
If I were the woman, I would attempt a radical neural stemcell treatment instead. If it goes wrong, then cut off the hand.
The one you re born with is far superior to what science is currently able to provide, and it doesn't scare children.
If I had a nonfunctioning hand, I think I'd be happier with an exoskeleton, because it would be easy to install and uninstall. It's much more difficult to unamputate a hand.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
Synthetic prostheses will probably end up being a dead end, for normal people at least. If your goal is to get someone back to 100% function of their original organic hand (or an idealized perfectly functional human hand if it was already malfunctioning from birth) then growing a new hand, either in situ or in a lab for later grafting, seems more likely. After all, we carry around everything we need to grow more body parts--that's how you got your original hands. Coaxing the body to do that trick again will likely be accomplished before we can make a synthetic body part that works just as well as a real one.
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
I see no problem with replacing a hand. I want to replace my entire body. Until we know how to digitize the brain it would probably have to be a brain in an enclosure inside a robot body but later the goal would be to replace the brain. Do synapse by synapse replacement while you are awake and by the end you can think thousands to millions of time faster and at no time did you ever die.
Imagine all you could learn and see with a fully robotic body. You could explore space, many places on this planet that humans can't go and you would live long enough to see participate in many things that humans are only beginning to work on now. I would love to live for millions to billions of years and learn everything that I could.
Once you are fully digital you could even make probes to send down to new planets and it would feel just like you where there but if the probe is destroyed you would be fine since you could run it on remote. You could even have your brain be a massively redundant computer with stable memory in case of full power loss. Humans bodies are just not up to what I want to do and I prefer to go the technology route and fix the problem instead of accepting the limitations of what humans can do. We have been at our best trying to strive beyond what we can do, even if we don't reach our goal we learn a lot in the process. Artificial eyes, ears, legs, arms etc will help many people.
Computer modeling for biotech drug manufacturing is HARD!
Replacing non-functional limbs with functional prosthetics has been going on for decades. Decades ago this was controversial, especially for children with birth defect limb deficiencies. My father-in-law, Dr. Leon M. Kruger, was the chief surgeon at a Shriners Hospital for Crippled Children. He conducted and published a study following children as they grew up, comparing measures of success in life skills, schooling, careers, happiness, etc. for those who did or did not have amputations. The success of those with amputations and prosthetics far exceeded those who kept the nonfunctional hands, arms, feet or legs. As they grew up, many of these children sent Dr. Kruger movies of themselves engaged in sports, riding motorcycles, etc. One favorite story was of a motorcyclist with a prosthetic who was in an accident. He was stuck in a position unable to remove his prosthetic which was pinned down under the motorcycle. He shouted to the first responders, "Take off my leg. Take off my leg." They told him not to worry, they could get him out with amputation. He most emphatically told them he'd be able to get himself away if they would just disconnect his leg. You might consider that a sick story. He thought it was funny, as did the teenager swimming in a lake in the summer of 1975 who grabbed onto the dock, stuck his stump in the air, and yelled, "Shark, Shark."
I thought that was Oscar Goldman's department...
there are 3 kinds of people:
* those who can count
* those who can't
We created technology, and therefore we know how it works. We didn't create the human body, and it didn't come with an instruction manual.
Even so, we've come a long way in medicine. Being able to use nerve impulses to control a bionic implant is amazing to me.
Most of us don't want to fly anyway.
The reapers are here.
We think we have all this "technology" but we are really only good at a few things. Burning fossil fuels in a turbine, mass-producing items and putting transistors on a tiny chip so we can play video games
Really? That is how you sum up all of human endevour? We have come so far and acheived so much since we came down from the trees. We have sent space ships out beyond our solar system, and explored the depths of the ocean that would crush a man if he ventured that far down. We can repair our bodies in extrodinary ways that were unheard of even 50 years ago. Doctors can use robots to perform surgery on people half a world away. We can make a robotic hand for someone. We made the world a smaller place by allowing us to talk to each other anywhere we want. We made Jersey Shore.
OK, we still have a long way to go, but why not see that as an exciting opportunity rather than bitch and moan that we haven't invented everything yet.
Why can't we fix a few grams of living matter? Because we aren't nearly as clever as we think we are.
Do you really think that the doctors in this case are so deluded that they think that they can fix this woman's hand? Obviously not, otherwise we would not be talking about fitting a bionic hand. Do you think the woman thinks that we are so clever that we can fix her hand? Obviously not, otherwise we would not be talking about fitting a bionic hand (again).
So who is it that thinks we are more clever than we really are? Not the people in the story. Not the people posting here. I know that it is certainly not you. You are too busy seeing the negative in everything around you. Maybe you are just still bitter that we don't all have flying cars like the old science fiction stories promised you when you were a child.
Cost 6 million dollars?
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
The doctor, Oskar C. Aszmann, first performed a similar operation last year.
If the lady wants an artificial hand, that should be her call, but you have to wonder about her judgement if she wants a proctologist to do the procedure.
Doesn't she know that she's now dependent on Neuropozyne for the rest of her life?
I remember when Linux was good... too...
Well most computing hardware is etched onto the fairly stable medium of silicon. Most cells, pretty much all of them in persons have membranes have membranes composed of phospholipids studded with proteins. Which substrate seems friendlier to work with.
http://www.aaronrogier.net
Doesn't this sound a bit drastic? Damn, if it were me I'd be hax0ring it.
There's groups on places like the Open Prosthetic Project, who could design something for a use case like this. Probably for less than the cost of a "replacement."
Why remove her hand, when you could support it with a rigid exoskeleton? Minimalist carbon fiber spars and rings (a ring around each knuckle), very light but strong, and little external actuators that sit in the wrist / forearm. Nylon worm gear and a little 12V DC motor for each digit. Run back to an Arduino or similar and pull input from the last-known-good nerves around the base of the arm. Basically support the (numb) arm in position and have the exoskeleton move it around. Lock the wrist in the first iteration as you refine the design. Lots of little vacuum actuated suckers that keep the whole shebang stuck to the skin (creepy, but secure!)
A hundred bucks of carbon fiber, maybe a couple thousand bucks of really good fasteners and electronics, tubing, motors, pump, rubber and CNC work. $10,000 a month (for 3-6 months, depending) to a hacker who knows what he's doing.
Just sayin'.
Wrists killing you? Not in 2 weeks. Learn Dvorak.
What is your stance on the drunkard being forced to work for the rest of their life and pass on the debt to his/her descendants to pay off the procedure?
His/Her descendants have about as much guilt as you or me, passing on a debt to them wouldn't be right.
This is the kind of thing you should have an insurance for, not assume that someone who didn't have anything to do with it should pay for.
I'm asking for... a friend.
Facebook (and others) will never be the same after this....
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
"Why can't we fix a few grams of living matter?"
Sorry space man, we humans haven't conquered mortality yet.
Before going the route of DarthVader, would they not see if they can't do a full hand transplant. I seem to recall a successful one being accomplished already in the not so distant past.
Call me old-fashioned and socialist, but here in the UK third party liability insurance would cover these costs and no jury would be involved. It might be tricky convincing the insurance company to pay $5m though. The solution to that is to nationalise the people who make the bionic arms and reduce the absurd profiteering.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Unless they're being used as money shelters in some way, passing debt on to descendants is barbaric.
I would trade in my fully working arms to get bionic replacements.
Hell, I would have my head transplanted onto a fully functional robotic body.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
The problem with the suggestions of restoring function to her existing one is that it ignores that there is a definite time limit to being a candidate for any sort of nerve restoration or, for that matter, any form of electrostim manipulation--if her hand is withered as the article says, she's out of this window. Once the muscles have atrophied away practically entirely (and she's been without movement of it for over a decade, so this is likely) the odds of getting it restored to more usefulness than a permanently attached blunt object is...somewhere up there with an angel coming down from Heaven and giving you a spaceship, ownership of an Earth-sized mass of precious metals, and magic powers. (No, aliens that look like angels would not count. The odds of the existence of supernatural beings from the afterlife who appear in nighties with bird wings is part of the calculation of the probability of the cited event.)
More importantly, once you start getting phantom limb pains, the window for getting the nerves reconnected is definitely gone. Phantom limb comes from your brain reassigning the blocks that had been originally used by the now-lost part of the body (or what it is 'reading' as lost) to new places. Yes, you could probably take terrible advantage of this and find the patch of skin that has been granted use of that part of the somatosensory map, but it tends to be somewhere on the face. (2nd choice is probably the hands, if that wasn't what was lost, followed by either the feet or...let's call it the crotch, OK?) This would be probably less desirable, from a purely aesthetic point of view, especially if the phantom limb sensations are actually due to your underwear irritating the area between your legs as opposed to your cheek or foot being itchy.
Incidentally, the model she's interested in would be reading the lower arm, not the back muscles for its 'input.' Given that you actually use the muscles in your forearm for much of your hand motions, it might actually give her a decent chance should we be able to regrow hands within her lifetime at actually being able to get a flesh-and-blood hand that's as functional as a bionic one would be. Her current one is definitely shot if it's withered--implanting new muscle to any great extent is probably a significantly more complex task than regrowing or even transplanting--and keeping it would actually likely lower the chances of success with a regrown as she will keep losing muscles and nerve supply to the part. (The classic mnemonic here is that you use it or lose it.) The bionic hand might be able to at least slow the rate of loss.
Your hypothetical hypothesis is bullocks, as the Brits say. No jury would award only a year's salary to someone who could no longer work in their profession. As Judge Judy says, "that's redikolus".
However, I think an optician could still work with only one arm, but costing a homeless person an arm is going to cost you millions, let alone a professional. So you might want to stay off that phone when you're driving, and make sure your insurance is current.
Free Martian Whores!
You move to a country with a civilized health care system. I can't see the most advanced bionic arm ever made costing more than 100k to make, after R & D.
"People don't want to learn linux" hasn't been a valid excuse since '03.