SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Scientists have developed sensor technology for a robotic prosthetic arm that detects signals from nerves in the spinal cord.
To control the prosthetic, the patient has to think like they are controlling a phantom arm and imagine some simple manoeuvres, such as pinching two fingers together. The sensor technology interprets the electrical signals sent from spinal motor neurons and uses them as commands.
A motor neuron is a nerve cell that is located in the spinal cord. Its fibres, called axons, project outside the spinal cord to directly control muscles in the body. Robotic arm prosthetics currently on the market are controlled by the user twitching the remnant muscles in their shoulder or arm, which are often damaged. This technology is fairly basic in its functionality, only performing one or two grasping commands. This drawback means that globally around 40-50 per cent of users discard this type of robotic prosthetic.
The team in this study, published in the journal Nature Biomedical Engineering, say detecting signals from spinal motor neurons in parts of the body undamaged by amputation, instead of remnant muscle fibre, means that more signals can be detected by the sensors connected to the prosthetic. This means that ultimately more commands could be programmed into the robotic prosthetic, making it more functional.
Elective surgery to route nerves to mounts for an extra pair of arms would be very helpful for home projects, too.
Full paper available from Nature
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Friday February 10 2017, @05:58PM
It's true I am not sure what I am saying, but then I don't think anyone else is, either.
The human brain is quite plastic, and people who've been experimenting with body modification, brain hacking, and the like have already reported interesting results. There was the story of the person who implanted a magnet to detect magnetic north; he said that after a while it became a sixth sense he took for granted, and after it was removed it felt like he was missing a limb.
Also, we already do have the mental maps for controlling arms, hands, and fingers. It's not like interfacing with a backhoe. Of course it would be weird at first to have extra arms with their extra sensory input, but I suspect we might be able to adjust quicker than it would be to dig a trench.
There's a lot of fun/cool stuff people have yet to try out in this area. Imagine the same thing again, but with the same morphology as a gibbon, scaled to a human, such that gibbon-like brachiation was possible. That would be a blast. And when you're done brachiating, remove the harness and you're a normal human again.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 12 2017, @07:59AM
Monkeys were feeding themselves with neural patched robotic limbs ~2003. The trick is not getting it to work, since just like wiggling your ears in front of a mirror it can be done pretty easily in practice, but rather getting it to work *without* rejection or a high mortality rate. It's major biomedical engineering/R&D. The patents are fascinating stuff.