Thought-Controlled Prosthetics 88
Ponca City, We Love You writes "Physiatrist Todd A. Kuiken, M.D., Ph.D. has pioneered a technique known as targeted muscle reinnervation (TMR), that allows a prosthetic arm to respond directly to the brain's signals, allowing wearers to open and close their artificial hands and bend and straighten their artificial elbows nearly as naturally as their own arms. Doctors first perform nerve transfer surgery to redirect nerves that go to the amputated arm to the patient's chest muscles. Then when the chest muscle contracts, an electromyogram picks up the electrical signal to move the prosthetic arm. So when the patient thinks 'close hand,"' the hand closes. Now the team wants to see if they can extract more information from the electrical signals produced by the nerves to provide a greater number of hand and arm movements. Theyd have been able to identify unique EMG patterns with 95% accuracy for 16 different elbow, wrist, hand, thumb, and finger movements. 'We've been able to demonstrate remarkable control of artificial limbs and it's an exciting neural machine interface that provides a lot of hope,' says Dr. Kuiken."
Re:Semi-serious thought... (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually, thats an even more disturbing thought that robotroops. Medical companies financing a war so they get lots of maimed soldiers to experiment on.
The reason it occured to me, is that the US currently has a bit of a shortage of troops in Iraq, and certainly faces one going into Iran. Getting an arm or leg blown off is currently a permanant ticket home. I'm sure they would love to be able to strap on a replacement limb and send the poor buggar back out there to get blown up some more.
Re:You win (Score:2, Insightful)