Researchers at Cleveland Clinic have used a bionic prosthetic arm and engineered it to communicate with the user’s brain. The aim was to develop a prosthetic that is capable of working more like a natural limb and provides users with feeling. Researchers on the project constructed their prosthetic device using an off–the–shelf product.
The team said to have integrated what they like to call “high-level computing” along with touch sensation and movement sensation into the device. The bionic arm looks similar to any other out there, but on the inside, it’s much more advanced and offers more feedback to the user compared to other devices.
At par with people without amputation
According to researcher Dr. Marasco, it’s the first bionic prosthetic that communicates with the user’s brain, behaving and functioning as they did before amputation.
For the research, the team used two participants that had an upper limb amputation. While using the bionic arm, they were able to perform tasks with accuracy on par with those who didn’t suffer from amputation. The device can connect to the amputee’s brain with the help of limb nerves to enable them to move the arm by simply thinking about it.
Communicating with the user’s brain
The arm can instantly send sensation information to the brain about how the hand is moving and is coming in contact with something. Marasco also said the users feel like their arm is moving. They can also feel the bionic fingers touching objects despite that they don’t have any fingers.
As per the researcher, when all the systems work in tandem with the prosthetic device, the user’s brain feels like the prosthetic hand is natural. The findings of the study will be used for further studies that aim to develop bionic limbs common. Besides, MIT researchers have developed an algorithm that allowed the robot for “safe impacts” on top of collision avoidance. This lets the robot make contact with a human safely to accomplish a task.
