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posted by hubie on Wednesday February 01 2023, @10:09AM   Printer-friendly
from the ethernet-over-spinal-cord dept.

Unused bandwidth in neurons can be tapped to control extra limbs:

What could you do with an extra limb? Consider a surgeon performing a delicate operation, one that needs her expertise and steady hands—all three of them. As her two biological hands manipulate surgical instruments, a third robotic limb that's attached to her torso plays a supporting role. Or picture a construction worker who is thankful for his extra robotic hand as it braces the heavy beam he's fastening into place with his other two hands. Imagine wearing an exoskeleton that would let you handle multiple objects simultaneously, like Spiderman's Dr. Octopus. Or contemplate the out-there music a composer could write for a pianist who has 12 fingers to spread across the keyboard.

Such scenarios may seem like science fiction, but recent progress in robotics and neuroscience makes extra robotic limbs conceivable with today's technology. Our research groups at Imperial College London and the University of Freiburg, in Germany, together with partners in the European project NIMA, are now working to figure out whether such augmentation can be realized in practice to extend human abilities. The main questions we're tackling involve both neuroscience and neurotechnology: Is the human brain capable of controlling additional body parts as effectively as it controls biological parts? And if so, what neural signals can be used for this control?

[...] Two practical questions stand out: Can we achieve neural control of extra robotic limbs concurrently with natural movement, and can the system work without the user's exclusive concentration? If the answer to either of these questions is no, we won't have a practical technology, but we'll still have an interesting new tool for research into the neuroscience of motor control. If the answer to both questions is yes, we may be ready to enter a new era of human augmentation. For now, our (biological) fingers are crossed.


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  • (Score: 2) by Immerman on Thursday February 02 2023, @04:50PM

    by Immerman (3985) on Thursday February 02 2023, @04:50PM (#1289881)

    You're not wrong, but direct nerve stimulation is *extremely* cutting edge. Mostly because it's only very recently that we've developed implants that don't rapidly cause nerve scarring that renders them useless.

    Most advanced modern prosthetics use indirect nerve reading and stimulation - e.g. muscle nerves that should go to the amputated limb are wired to a small patch of muscle on the chest or something as a signal amplifier, so that surface electrodes can detect the electrical signal and turn it into motion, while feedback is provided by electrodes on a piece of skin somewhere, which the users brain rapidly learns to interpret as coming from the prosthetic.

    Basically, the brain is *crazy* adaptable. As an example of a noninvasive prosthetic enhancement that adds senses, there's a military project (being tested? Already deployed?) to provide (thermal?) infrared night vision without spoiling a soldier's natural night vision like goggles do. Instead they place a card on the tongue that has a grid of electrodes on it and play the video feed across them in the form of electric stimulation. Apparently it doesn't take long before they learn to interpret the signals as a visual image they can make sense of.

    For neural implants... the monkey test I referred to above involved implanting electrodes in the part of its brain that controlled arm movements, with the goal of making a remote robot arm duplicate the natural arms movements. Soon afterwards the monkey learned to move the robot arm without moving its real arm, and I *think* could move its real arm independently as well.

    For sensory feedback they'd probably just wire directly to some of the nerves for a patch of skin somewhere as a simplified version of getting the skin mounted electrodes positioned just right every time. It probably wouldn't even take long to learn to distinguish between actual skin touches, and the tiny percentage of those nerves receiving "my robot arm feels things" messages.

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