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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
In other news, DARPA announced the first functional light saber ...
Yeah, can you detach it and set it to "auto"?
I'm asking for... a friend.
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ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
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."
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
The real question is why she doesn't want to use FES (Functional Electrical Stimulation) of her existing musculature. The interface is going to be the same as with a fully mechanical robotic hand, and the aesthetic outcome far superior.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
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."
Granted, overall it's superior, but fake hands can do different individual things better, too. A prosthetic hand could easily be stronger than a real hand, for example. I don't know if anybody has worked on this, but I'm sure it's possible to do so. A prosthetic hand could also have more movement options. It could spin, for example, or the fingers could go all of the way back.
I think that under certain conditions, for certain people, a prosthetic limb could be better than a real one.
I don't respond to AC's.
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
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.
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