Bionic armed woman regains sense of touch
By Darren Murph 
posted Feb 4th 2007 9:50AM
posted Feb 4th 2007 9:50AM
Although Matsushita and Activelink have rolled out a rehabilitating robotic suit aimed at giving handicapped individuals their ability to maneuver their own body parts once again, it appears that Claudia Mitchell has regained her sense of movement using a slightly different apparatus. Touted as wearing the "world's first" bionic arm controlled by thought alone, she now has the ability to carry out simple, albeit quite critical tasks again such as cutting up food. Doctors have re-routed the nerve endings in her arm to "a patch of skin on her chest," essentially enabling her prosthetic arm to respond to her thoughts concerning movement. Furthermore, a recent study of her wrist, hand, and elbow functions revealed that she could perform tasks "four times quicker than with a conventional prosthesis," and the team hopes to install "touch sensors" on the artificial hand in order to allow for tactile feedback in the future. Claudia seems to be understandably thrilled with the results thus far, as it even allows her to accomplish tasks such as putting on makeup and feeding herself -- but we're slightly disappointed that she apparently hasn't given a round of Wii Sports a go to build up those oh-so-crucial hand-eye coordination skills, but we're sure that challenge is just around the bend.[Via Digg]
Amazing.
I for one welcome our limb controlling, Wii wrangling robotic overlords.
"Bionic armed woman regains sense of touch"
"...the team hopes to install "touch sensors" on the artificial hand in order to allow for tactile feedback in the future."
Nothing like overly sensational and totally inaccurate headlines eh?
WOW! This is really cool ... I guess those ideas from movies with people walking around being half robots are closer than we think ... And it's good!
Peconi
www.VistaJuice.com
Rivet, no kidding. The headline is an outright lie.
learned about this in class. And there was a guy that's had this for a while, so I don't think she's the first... maybe the first with the commercial version of the product or something.
They take the ends of nerves that used to feed the missing arm and use them to innervate bundles of the pectoral muscles (which is no longer used because the patient has no arm!). Then they used surface electrodes to pick-up when the pectoral muscles are being flexed (which occurs when the patient "trys" to move her missing arm). Use this pattern of activation to send inputs to the arm actuators and volia!
Note that there are 3 set of muscle bundles (see pic). In the testing with the other dude I saw he was able to control 2 of the 3 types of motion at once (any combo i believe). cool stuff!
It's no lie about the sense of touch, if you actually read the article then you'd know that "Sensation nerves on the hand are re-routed to a patch of skin on the chest giving patient the sense of touch"
This stuff is awesome. It'll be great when we can get the cost low enough that anybody can get one, instead of just the insanely rich.
Anyone know how these are powered?
Anyone else thinking: Borg?
According to the article this woman has not yet regained her sense of touch, did the person who wrote the headline actually read it, or is just a copy and paste from all the other sites that are passing around this error?
No you fools! It's a headline from the FUTURE! About a completely unrelated thing!
But seriously, can we get some journalistic accountability? Shouldn't you update the article and change the title? Because really, it isn't true, at all. I've seen updates like that before, i know you can... Come on now, you know you want to...
I don't ever hate on engadget like some people do, but this is just bad....
-Taylor
I'm not overly surprised at the rate prosthetic research and development is progressing. You hear about the deaths in Iraq. What you don't hear about on the nightly news is how many of our troops survived but lost a limb. The VA hospital is so packed here in MN that veterans from that police action are finding it hard to even get on a waiting list for things like surgery. God knows my macanic can't. He's on a 9 month waiting list.
While this is going to be a godsend for many, the reason such things are progressing so fast is still grim.
This was first achieved last year on a man named Jesse Sullivan. Here is the full article on cnn.
http://www.cnn.com/2006/US/03/22/btsc.oppenheim.bionic/
Wouldn't it be great to get (hopefully detacheable) extra limbs like this, not just replacements?
It's pretty awesome. The idea of hooking up nerve endings to electronic devices is pretty old but it's amazing to see somebody _make it work_. I am sure there's a long way to go, but I do hope they continue this research full speed so in 20 years or so they can do real robotic limb replacements. Maybe in a choice of colors and styles and of course with built-in gadgets.
In fact, there's so much more potential to this technology, for all of us. It's amazing.
This technology is being mis-used... if they can do this, they should be able to hook us up right to a computer.