{"id":2308,"date":"2019-08-14T09:12:59","date_gmt":"2019-08-14T14:12:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceandsf.com\/?p=2308"},"modified":"2019-08-14T09:13:01","modified_gmt":"2019-08-14T14:13:01","slug":"newly-developed-prosthetic-arm-is-so-advanced-it-not-only-is-controlled-by-the-brain-but-it-gives-the-user-an-almost-natural-sense-of-feeling","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scienceandsf.com\/index.php\/2019\/08\/14\/newly-developed-prosthetic-arm-is-so-advanced-it-not-only-is-controlled-by-the-brain-but-it-gives-the-user-an-almost-natural-sense-of-feeling\/","title":{"rendered":"Newly developed Prosthetic arm is so advanced it not only is controlled by the brain but it gives the user an almost natural sense of feeling."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The development of prosthetic limbs has advanced so quickly in the last few years that it really seems as if our technology is catching up to the science fiction ‘bionic’ limbs in movies and TV from 40 or 50 years ago. In fact a new prosthetic arm being developed at the University of Utah is so sophisticated that the researchers have named it the ‘Luke Arm’ for the ‘Star Wars’ character Luke Skywalker who famously lost his arm to Darth Vader and had it replaced with an artificial one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Steve Austin, ‘The Six Million Dollar Man’ was a cyborg with an artificial arm and two artificial legs (Credit: Amazon)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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In ‘The Empire Strikes Back’ Luke Skywalker looses his arm in a fight with Darth Vader and gets a replacement! (Credit: 20th century Fox)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

While the prosthetic undergoing testing is designed for people who have had their left arm amputated below the elbow but the developers are confident that the design can be easily adapted to both the right hand and amputations above the elbow. Mechanically the arm is constructed of metal motors overlayed by a clear silicon skin which has had one hundred electronic sensors imbedded in it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The Luke arm being benchtested at the University of Utah (Credit: Unews, University of Utah)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

So sophisticated is the prosthetic that not only can it move and grab in response to signals from the wearer’s brain but it can send sensory signals back to the brain that are interpreted as the feelings of touch, heat and even pain. This is accomplished by a system of microelectrodes and wires that are implanted in the wearer’s forearm and connected between the nerve endings of the lost limb and the arm’s one hundred sensors.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The Luke Arm’s Sensoty electrode carries 100 sensory inputs between the arm and the Brain (Credit: Unews, University of Utah)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The\nsystem of microelectrodes has been named the Utah Slanted Electrode Array and\nwas invented by Professor Emeritus Richard A. Normann. The array is connected\nto an external computer that serves as a translator between the biological and\nelectronic signals. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Patients using the ‘Luke Arm’ have succeeded in performing even delicate activities such as removing a single grape from a bunch or picking up an egg. This is because the sensors in the arm allow the user to actually feel the softness or hardness of the objects they touch. One test subject, Keven Walgomott of West Valley City Utah, even asserted that he could feel the softness of his wife’s hand as he held it with the ‘Luke Arm’. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Volunteer amputee Keven Walgomott using the Luke Arm (Credit: Interesting Engineering)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

According\nto Jacob George, the study main author and a doctoral candidate at the\nUniversity of Utah. “We changed the way we are sending that information to\nthe brain so that it matches the human body\u2026We’re making more biologically\nrealistic signals.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The\nresearchers are currently working on a portable version of the Luke arm that\nwill allow in home trials to begin. Testing of the Luke arm could take another\nfew years before FDA approval is granted and the prosthetic becomes\ncommercially available. Nevertheless, the day is coming when artificial limbs\nwill be providing amputees with a quality of life that is nearly equal to the\nnatural ones they have lost.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you’d like to see the Luke arm in action click on the link below to be taken to a youtube video from the University of Utah. https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=_Xl6rFvuR08<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In\nthe story above I mentioned that Luke arm has one hundred sensors implanted\nwith it. Now that may sound like a lot but of course a real arm has thousands\nof nerve endings giving our brain a much more complete impression of everything\nthat’s happening to that limb. Could an electronic skin, like that on Luke arm,\never be developed that possesses as many sensors as natural skin?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

They’re already working on it! Scientists at the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at the National University of Singapore have developed a sampling architecture of sensor arrays that they have named the ‘Asynchronously Coded Electronic Skin’ (ACES). The engineers assert that ACES could work with arrays of up to 10,000 sensors and have even fabricated and tested a 250 sensor array to demonstrate their technique.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Some of the sensors used to test ACES (Credit: Edgy.app)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Now\nthere are several problems that you’re to need to overcome if you intend to greatly\nincrease the number of sensors in your system. The first is simply data\noverload, that is more data than a computer, or even our brain can handle. The\nsecond is sampling speed. With thousands of sensors waiting to have their data\ntaken, even at a high sampling rate a large faction of a second or more can\npass between each time a particular sensor is sampled. That means that an\nemergency signal, burning heat or a stabbing wound could go unnoticed until\nreal damage is done.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The technique used by the engineers in Singapore is actually modeled on the way the nerves in our body communicate with the brain, an ‘event based’ sampling protocol. Think about it, when you first sit down in a chair you feel a large area of pressure as your skin makes contact, but after a second or so you hardly feel the chair at all. This is because our brain only reacts to changes to the messages from our nerves. The brain only pays attention when our nerves tell it that something, an event, is happening.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The electronic architecture of ACES (Credit: Cosmos Magazine)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The\nACES system does much the same thing, only passing on the data of sensors that\nare measuring changes to their environment. In this way it prevents data\noverload while at the same time enabling important information to quickly\nbecome available to the controlling intelligence. \n\nThe researchers in Singapore hope that their\nACES system will prove to be applicable not only for sensors in prosthetic\nlimbs but also for increasing the ability of Artificial Intelligence systems to\nsense and manipulate their environment. In that way ACES may be another step\nforward in shaping the human-machine interface of the future. \n\n\n\n<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The development of prosthetic limbs has advanced so quickly in the last few years that it really seems as if our technology is catching up to the science fiction ‘bionic’ limbs in movies and TV from 40 or 50 years ago. In fact a new prosthetic arm being developed at the University of Utah is … Continue reading “Newly developed Prosthetic arm is so advanced it not only is controlled by the brain but it gives the user an almost natural sense of feeling.”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[812,809,813,810,811],"class_list":["post-2308","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science","tag-aces","tag-advanced-prosthetic","tag-electronic-skin","tag-luke-arm","tag-robotics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/scienceandsf.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2308","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/scienceandsf.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/scienceandsf.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scienceandsf.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scienceandsf.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2308"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/scienceandsf.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2308\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2318,"href":"https:\/\/scienceandsf.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2308\/revisions\/2318"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/scienceandsf.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2308"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scienceandsf.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2308"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scienceandsf.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2308"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}