New Success For Brain-Controlled Prosthetic Arm 81
An anonymous reader writes "A number of amputees are now using a prosthetic arm that moves intuitively, when they think about moving their missing limb. Todd Kuiken and colleagues at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago surgically rearrange the nerves that normally connect to the lost limb and embed them in muscles in the chest. The muscles are then connected to sensors that translate muscle movements into movement in a robotic arm. The researchers first reported the technique in a single patient in 2007, and have now tested it in several more. The patients could all successfully move the arm in space, mimic hand motions, and pick up a variety of objects, including a water glass, a delicate cracker, and a checker rolling across a table. (Three patients are shown using the arm in the related video.) The findings are reported today in Journal of the American Medical Association."
Re:Stem Cells (Score:3, Insightful)
Using your analogy, we shouldn't have done any development on steam engines since internal combustion engines would be so much better and just needed some more research.
Second point, robotics engineers are not cellular biologists. You can't just "divert resources" like that.
Re:Stem Cells (Score:4, Insightful)
Dead end? Having a prosthetic limb which can be controlled as if it was your own lost limb certainly doesn't seem like a "dead end". Tech that we have now is always superior to tech that we might probably get sometime in the future — right up until such a time as we have the newer, better tech. This experiment might just be proof-of-concept, but it looks relatively close to being user-ready (as opposed to limb regeneration, which holds promise but who knows when we'll actually be able to do it).
By that reasoning, I'd refuse to upgrade from dial-up until they ran a fibre link to my home.
Re:why just amputees? (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes it does!
When you are born you don't control the "bits you were born with" very well, you have to learn that.
It takes from for a baby to crawl, toddle, walk, run.
It takes more time to learn to do such things with accuracy, and more complicated control takes more time again - professional athletes and sports players are not born with the ability, it's is learnt through training and practice, which does exactly what the parent suggests.
If you are 30, then you have had 30 years "teaching yourself" to use all of the bits you were born with. So don't expect to learn new prosthesis (or other devices) to the same level of competency in a few weeks.
The challenge is making these things easy to learn to a 'useful' competency in a very short period; but actual competency would rise with more usage, and ultimately it could very easily exceed your skill with other parts of the body.
I would expect that an implanted 'mouse/keyboard interface' would be used much more competently than the limbs by someone that spends all day using it to interface with computers; likewise, I would expect an athlete to use the limbs much more competently than the computer interface.
We already do (Score:3, Insightful)
Try using a mouse to control a pointer in a GUI.
Next, use a mouse to control a character in an FPS game.
Next, use a mouse to control little creatures in an RTS game.
After enough practice, when you do all of that do you actually think of where you move your arm, hands and fingers?
You don't. You just think of controlling some extension of yourself.
Same for typing, using a screwdriver, etc.
Same goes for driving car. If you drive a car, next time observe that your hands move near subconsciously to turn the steering wheel so as to satisfy your intention that your car stays in its lane (well that is if you're one of those drivers who can stick to one lane
Why do you think most people have handedness? For most people learning to use a tool with the "other" hand is almost like learning to use a new tool all over again. It's not really a matter of "right" or "left", it's a matter of "different". Most people can't "flip" the "learnt mapping" to the other hand easily (which is what being ambidextrous is).
The dominant hand usually gets first choice in learning to use a tool. It doesn't necessarily mean your your "nondominant" hand is less "skilled", it is likely to be better at some things than your dominant hand (like using the other side of the keyboard
On the other hand, there are some people like Nadal who is righthanded but learnt to play tennis with his left hand just to have an advantage