2023-05-15 06:00:00
Traditionally, prosthetic designers have been inspired by the human body. Prosthetics were seen as a replacement for missing body parts – and eventually led to the development of realistic bionic legs, arms and hands. For some time now, however, an alternative prosthetics movement has been forming that does not stick to convention and does not try to adapt, reports MIT Technology Review in its current issue 4/2023. Instead of creating devices that mimic the appearance of a “normal” arm or leg, she and her fellow designers create fantastical prosthetics and artificial limbs that can wriggle like tentacles, glow, or even emit glitter.
Dani Clode is a prosthesis specialist at Plasticity Lab at the University of Cambridge, where she searches for new ways to optimize the human body. A third thumb that anyone can use to tighten their grip is their current project. The flexible device is powered by motors and controlled by pressure sensors in the wearer’s shoes. Volunteers have learned to unscrew it, drink tea and even play the guitar. Clode hopes the thumb (and similar devices) could one day help everyone from factory workers to surgeons perform tasks more efficiently while putting less strain on their bodies.
Brain can adapt to new limbs
Recent neurological research confirms this hope. For a long time, when developing medical devices, it was assumed that a prosthesis should correspond to the brain’s expectations so that it could be operated as “naturally” as possible, says Tamar Makin from the University of Cambridge. The prosthesis should therefore be shaped and behave mechanically like a hand. However, Makin’s research confirms: Our brains are actually very flexible in their ability to adapt to new limbs.
In a 2020 paper published in PLOS Biology, Makin’s lab examined the brains of prosthetic and non-prosthetic wearers using an fMRI machine to see how certain areas of the brain react to the presence of a prosthesis. “Prostheses weren’t represented like hands,” says Makin, “but they weren’t represented like tools either.” Instead, they seemed to trigger a unique neural signature – neither hand nor tool, but something previously unknown. These patterns were consistent across users, suggesting that most people can easily adapt to a variety of artificial limb configurations.
Artificial intelligence went mainstream almost overnight with ChatGPT. How do we deal with the changes that the big AI models will bring about? That’s what the new issue of MIT Technology Review is all about. Highlights from the magazine:
Some research groups want to outwit the brain to a certain extent in order to achieve a more or less natural control of artificial limbs. Because the subjective feeling for one’s own body and the position of one’s own limbs is by no means fixed and unchangeable, as the rubber hand illusion shows, for example. An important key to such out-of-body experiences are simultaneous visual and tactile stimuli: in the rubber hand experiment, the person concerned sees a feather sweeping over the rubber hand and at the same time feels a touch on their real – but hidden – hand.
Ryota Kondo and colleagues at Toyohashi University in Japan used this principle to describe the movement of the thumb of one hand to control a virtual, artificial arm in a VR environment. If the movement of the arm was synchronized with that of the thumb, the test participants actually reported in a final survey that the virtual arm had belonged to their body. Kondo and his colleagues hope that this way, controlling a real robotic arm will also feel more “natural,” easier to learn, and less tiring.
Read MIT Technology Review here:
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