Bionic Arm Reads Brain's Signals

Zarf writes "Dr. Todd A. Kuiken and the Doctors of the Rehabilitation Institue of Chicago have successfully used the nerve endings from an amputee's lost arm to drive a bionic replacement. Details are in this CNN story. Although this isn't new surgical work it is a clever and practical use of existing technologies which hasn't been done before. It offers the promise of other interesting applications as well such as hands-free wheelchair use or even hands-free mousing. The doctors hope that in time this technology will lead to other bionic replacement limbs as well."

Bionic limbs

[Henry V .009]

Anybody remember Heinlein's character from The Moon is a Harsh Mistress? The one who worked on computers, and had a different bionic arm attachment for every job?

Red Dwarf

[Vaevictis666]

Kryten had this one beat - groinial attachments :) He even cooked with them

Well,

[snubber1]

I remember watching an episode of Nova where a dude had lost the use of his legs and one arm. They implanted some electrodes in his arm that allowed him to open and close the grip on the one hand by shrugging his sholder to activate a switch.

Later they experimented with a special hat that read brain waves and allowed him to learn to control a box on the screen up and down. Once he had mastered the binary up/down control by pure thought, they connected it to his arm and just by thinking he could open and close his hand as any normal man should.