El Reg reports:
Austrian scientists have used a technique dubbed "bionic reconstruction" to connect a robot hand to grafted human nerves, enabling true mind-controlled prosthetics for the first time.
[...]Its creator, Oskar Aszmann, Head of the Christian Doppler Laboratory for the Restoration of Limb Functions at the MedUni Vienna's Department of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery [...] performed the surgery on three local volunteers who had hands that were crippled due to damage to the brachial plexus, the bundle of nerves that connect the spine to the arms and hand. A few residual nerves remained, but not enough for any useful control, only generating a few nanovolts, he reported in a research paper published by The Lancet. (Requires 6 cookies)
The team grafted muscle from the [subjects'] thighs onto their arms, to boost the nerve fibers present along the length of the arm and amplify their signals, and then let it heal. The patents then spent nine months learning to control the new muscles and interconnected nerves using an arm-mounted sensor pack.
[...][Each of the] three men had [his hand] cut off in an elective operation.
[...]Three months after the surgery[,] all three patients had significant success with the new hands and mobility tests reported nearly two-thirds the function of a normal hand.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Monday March 02 2015, @12:48PM
"That's not true! That's impossible!"
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 02 2015, @01:02PM
Pics or it didn't happen.. Why are there no pictures?
(Score: 2) by RobotMonster on Monday March 02 2015, @01:15PM
Sounds great! Disappointed I couldn't find any pictures or footage of the hands in action. The youtube video attached to TFA is just a talking-head-interview :-(.
I have some questions:
- What's the battery life?
- How powerful are the servos? (could you crack a walnut?)
- Can you play the piano? the guitar? the flute?
- What can you sense? hot? cold? soft? hard? sharp? wet?
- Does the hand become part of your body map -- do you get a sense of where your digits are?
- How long before artificial hands become so impressively superior to our biological ones that anybody who keeps their original hands is regarded as a luddite?
(Score: 4, Informative) by RobotMonster on Monday March 02 2015, @01:22PM
Turns out there are a couple of (not very informative) pictures under the El Reg link [theregister.co.uk]. I normally avoid clicking on those...