Claudia Mitchell has a new arm that she controls with her brain. Annalee Newitz has the story on io9. “Mitchell’s arm is ‘myoelectric,’ which means it picks up electrical signals coming straight from her brain, down her nerves. Electrodes help the signals jump from her body, to the prosthesis, which uses a computer to figure out which motion Mitchell is thinking about.”
The designer, Todd Kulken, wrote an article about the arm. He reminds us that we’ve built “a humanoid robot that can walk up and down stairs, a robot that can rove on Mars, collect samples, and send images back to Earth, and robots that are used to help perform surgery.” But prostheses present unique challenges. Targeted muscle reinnervation (TMR) is one solution:
The goal of TMR surgery is to utilize to the brain commands that still attempt to reach the missing limb… If these nerves are connected to different muscle sites, they can cause these other muscles to contract, producing the signals used to control myoelectric prostheses.
So the woman’s a cyborg. This kind of thing is not news, but it is still awesome.
This Joyful Noise 