Technut News

New Prosthetic Hand So Nimble an Amputee Can Type

A new prosthetic hand uses individually movable fingers to hold a credit card, use a keyboard and lift a heavy bag.

Researchers bill it as the world’s first commercially available prosthetic hand that can move each finger separately. The i-LIMB, made by the Scottish company Touch Bionics, is being tested at the Orthopedic University Hospital in Heidelberg, Germany.

The hydraulic hand went on sale in Britain last year for about $17,500 and is being used by a small number of people. The company began operations in the United States earlier this year and plans to make the device more widely available.

Unlike similar models that allowed gripping with just the thumb and one or two fingers, the i-LIMB allows a user to grab something with all five. It also feels softer and more natural than the typically hard prosthetics of old, its maker says.

Flexible hydraulic drives are located directly in the movable finger joints, and the prosthetic hand gives feedback to the user’s stump, enabling the amputee to sense the strength of the grip.

Bionic eye ‘blindness cure hope’

A ‘bionic eye’ may hold the key to returning sight to people left blind by a hereditary disease, experts believe.

A team at London’s Moorfields Eye Hospital have carried out the treatment on the UK’s first patients as part of a clinical study into the therapy.

The artificial eye, connected to a camera on a pair of glasses, has been developed by US firm Second Sight.

It said the technique may be able to restore a basic level of vision, but experts warned it was still early days.

The trial aims to help people who have been made blind through retinitis pigmentosa, a group of inherited eye diseases that affects the retina.

Scientists Develop A Bionic Mini Device For Blind People

A team of 36 scientists have developed a mini device which could help the visually impaired to get their sight sense back. The research was called The Boston Retinal Implant Project and it was started by Dr. Joseph Rizzo III back in the 1980s. This bionic device is small enough to be implanted in the eye and it will send images to the brain through a connector the thickness of human hair.

This will be possible within a few years because the mini-technology has developed so much over the last 20 years when it was started this project. Dr. Rizzo says that the bionic retinal device acts like a light transmitter and for the moment it’s supposed to restore partial sight for the blind people, but not for all of them - this doesn’t work for people who are blind since they were born and for those who suffer from glaucoma.

Scientists Develop Artificial Neural Networks

A research team from University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine have managed to “build” a mini-system made of human nervous cells. According to their studies, soldiers will be able to control the battlesuits with the help of their own nerve impulses and cyber-sex could go to the next level, the participants will feel the same pleasure as the one during “normal” sex.

This technology also has a good side - it could regrow human nerves and to repair potential damaged nerves. The first tests were made on rats, were successful, but they also tested it on humans and the results were amazing. They managed to grow neurons which lived for three months in a special “growth chamber”.

‘Star Wars’ arm opens up new world for NH amputee

A state-of-the-art robotic arm being developed at DEKA Research and Development in Manchester has enabled double amputee Chuck Hildreth to perform feats he never thought he would be able to accomplish again.

Hildreth, 44, lost both arms 26 years ago while painting a power substation; 15,000 volts of electricity surged through his body. His right arm was burned so badly doctors had to remove the shoulder blade and were able to save only a stub of his less-damaged left arm. He also lost three toes on each foot.

After years of using and discarding a number of clumsy and uncomfortable prosthetic devices, Hildreth is now one of three men taking part in the testing of the new prosthetic device known as the “Luke Arm” for its resemblance to the one Luke Skywalker was fitted with in the second “Star Wars” movie.

“I’m very fortunate to be part of this project. It’s one of the things I never thought I’d see in my lifetime,” Hildreth said.

Within hours of being outfitted with the arm, he was able to pick up pieces of wood, use a cordless power drill and even pick up a sheetrock screw and use the drill to put it into a sheetrock board.

See the video.

Accidental Discovery During Surgery Reverses Memory Loss

A “pacemaker” for the human brain might be on the horizon

A 50 year old man, dangerously obese, goes to the hospital for experimental brain surgery to suppress his appetite. A small piece of his skull is removed, and an electrical probe inserted deep into his brain tissue. It reaches his hypothalamus and current is switched on. Suddenly the patient — awake through the procedure — begins to speak uncontrollably about events in his past, events he had long forgotten. He remembers a day’s walk in the park 30 years ago, complete with what people were wearing, all in vivid color. He sees them speaking to him, every motion they made. The intensity and level of detail of the memories is frightening.

The scene may read like the script of a bad science fiction flick but it comes from an unidentified patient at Ontario’s Toronto Western Hospital. No one was more astonished than the man’s doctors, who began to experiment further on him. Over the next few weeks, they continued testing. His ability to both learn and remember was substantially increased when the electrodes were turned on. Continuous stimulation also had a residual effect — after the electrodes were off, there was still a slight benefit.

Electrode being inserted into brain

Double amputee walks again due to Bluetooth

Marine Lance Cpl. Joshua Bleill lost both his legs above the knees when a bomb exploded under his Humvee while on patrol in Iraq on October 15, 2006. He has 32 pins in his hip and a 6-inch screw holding his pelvis together.

Now, he’s starting to walk again with the help of prosthetic legs outfitted with Bluetooth technology more commonly associated with hands-free cell phones.

“They’re the latest and greatest,” Bleill said, referring to his groundbreaking artificial legs.

Bleill, 30, is one of two Iraq war veterans, both double leg amputees, to use the Bluetooth prosthetics. Computer chips in each leg send signals to motors in the artificial joints so the knees and ankles move in a coordinated fashion.

Bleill’s set of prosthetics have Bluetooth receivers strapped to the ankle area. The Bluetooth device on each leg tells the other leg what it’s doing, how it’s moving, whether walking, standing or climbing steps, for example.

“They mimic each other, so for stride length, for amount of force coming up, going uphill, downhill and such, they can vary speed and then to stop them again,” Bleill told CNN from Walter Reed Army Medical Center, where he’s undergoing rehab.

Electronic Contact Lenses for Better Vision

Researchers at the University of Washington managed to embed an electronic circuit and LEDs directly into contact lenses, which seemed to look good on rabbit eyes. Though the circuit is not functional and the lights don’t light up, the development shows that future applications like direct video to the eye may indeed be possible.

…

The prototype contact lens does not correct the wearer’s vision, but the technique could be used on a corrective lens, Parviz said. And all the gadgetry won’t obstruct a person’s view.

“There is a large area outside of the transparent part of the eye that we can use for placing instrumentation,” Parviz said. Future improvements will add wireless communication to and from the lens. The researchers hope to power the whole system using a combination of radio-frequency power and solar cells placed on the lens, Parviz said.

Artificial Cornea Gives Hope To The Blind

German researchers have developed an artificial cornea that promises easy integration with a patient’s native cornea, and prevents cellular hyperplasia on its plastic surface

…

Researchers in Dr. Karin Kobuch’s working group at Regensburg University Hospital have already tested these corneas in the laboratory and found that their cells graft very well at the edge and cease growing where the coating stops. The optical center of the implant thus remains clear. The first implants have already been tested in rabbits’ eyes - with promising results. If further tests are successful, the technology will be tried on humans in 2008.

Mechanical heart removed after organ heals self

A 15-year-old Camrose, Alta. girl has become one of the few patients to be taken off an artificial heart device because her own diseased heart healed itself.“It’s changed everything,” Melissa Mills told CTV’s Canada AM. “I have such a respect for life now.”

Mills was sent to Edmonton’s Stollery Children’s Hospital last year after a sudden illness affected her heart and a transplant was urgently needed.

Her parents were told to prepare for the possibility that their daughter might not survive.

Doctors at the hospital implanted a Berlin Heart, a mechanical device worn outside the body that keeps blood pumping in a person with a damaged heart. The Stollery is one of a few facilities in Canada to work with the Berlin Hearts, which are the world’s first mechanical hearts designed for children.

Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children, Montreal’s McGill University Health Centre and Sainte-Justine Hospital also work with the artificial heart device.

With that done, Mills then waited for a heart to become available for a transplant. At one point, she was at the top of the North American transplant list.

But over the next few months, her condition improved dramatically. Her own heart regained strength and after 146 days on the Berlin Heart, Melissa underwent surgery to have the device removed.

“For sure it’s a miracle,” Dr. Holger Buchholz, a heart specialist, said Tuesday.

Pentagon to implant microchips in soldiers’ brains

The Department of Defense is planning to implant microchips in soldiers’ brains for monitoring their health information, and has already awarded a $1.6 million contract to the Center for Bioelectronics, Biosensors and Biochips at Clemson University for the development of an implantable “biochip”.Soldiers fear that the biochip, about the size of a grain of rice, which measures and relays information on soldiers vital signs 24 hours a day, can be used to put them under surveillance even when they are off duty.

But Anthony Guiseppi-Elie, C3B director and Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and Bioengineering claims the that the invivo biosensors will save lives as first responders to the trauma scene could inject the biochip into the wounded victim and gather data almost immediately.

He believes that the device has other long-term potential applications, such as monitoring astronauts’ vital signs during long-duration space flights and reading blood-sugar levels for diabetics.

Engineers develop a mind-controlled prosthetic arm dexterous enough to play piano

This summer the team hit a critical milestone when it finished Proto 2, a thought-controlled mechanical arm—complete with hand and articulated fingers—that can perform 25 joint motions. This dexterity approaches that of a native arm, which can make 30 motions, and trumps the previously most agile bionic arm, the Proto 1, which could bend at the elbow, rotate its wrist and shoulder, and open and close its fingers. A person wearing a Proto 2 could conceivably play the piano.

How long before we voluntarily have our limbs amputated to replace them with superior technology?

Also see The Future Of Mind Control.