Prosthesis

Dyson Award for wearable robotic arm

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A battery-powered robotic arm that boosts human strength has won the 2013 James Dyson award.

The Titan Arm, designed by four mechanical engineering students from the University of Pennsylvania, could help people with back injuries rebuild and regain control of muscles.

Man wearing Titan Arm raised aloft

It can also be used by people to lift heavy objects as part of their work.

The team, who spent eight months creating the exoskeleton, will share a prize of £30,000 ($48,000).

“Titan Arm is obviously an ingenious design, but the team’s use of modern, rapid – and relatively inexpensive – manufacturing techniques makes the project even more compelling,” said Sir James Dyson.

“We are ecstatic,” team member Nick Parrotta told the BBC. “It was totally unexpected – just incredible.”

‘Inexpensive aluminium’

Team wearing titan arm
The University of Pennsylvania team shows off its award-winning Titan Arm

The team produced its prototype for £1,200, which they say is a 50th of the typical cost of similar exoskeletons currently on the market.

“We wanted Titan Arm to be affordable, as exoskeletons are rarely covered by health insurance,” said Mr Parrotta, 23, currently studying for a masters in mechanical engineering.

“This informed our design decisions and the materials we used. Most structural components are machined from inexpensive aluminium.”

Academic and commercial interest in wearable robotics is growing according to Conor Walsh, Professor of of Mechanical and Biomedical Engineering at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

But costs will have to continue falling if robotics are to feature more often in daily life, he said.

“Reducing cost will be critical for commercial systems, however the total cost is not just the cost of the hardware but also the added cost associated with research and development, quality assurance and regulatory compliance.”

The Titan arm incorporates a rigid back brace to maintain posture, a shoulder featuring rotational joints, and sensors that can track motion and relay data back to doctors for remote prognosis.

It can augment human weight-lifting strength by 40lbs (18kg), say the inventors, while the batteries can last for up to eight hours, depending on intensity of usage and workload.

Electrical signals

The current prototype is operated by a separate joystick, but future versions may incorporate electromyography technology, said Mr Parrotta, which picks up electrical signals produced by muscle tissue, thus allowing users to operate such prosthetics almost without thinking.

Photo of prosthetic hand
Handie, a prosthetic hand with sensors that can read brain signals, won second place

All of the inventors who took part in the competition used 3D-printing to develop and produce their prototypes much more cheaply than would have been possible before.

“Prototyping technology, previously reserved only for companies with big research and development budgets, is enabling young inventors to develop sophisticated concepts at university,” said Sir James.

“They can revitalise industries on a small budget – it is a good time to be an inventor.”

The second prize went to a Japanese team who created Handie, a prosthetic hand with sensors that can read brain signals.

A 3D-printed plastic cast for broken limbs, invented by a team from New Zealand, took the third prize.

The James Dyson Foundation runs the annual award across 18 countries with the aim of encouraging problem-solving inventions.

First Fully Bionic Man Walks, Talks and Breathes.

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He walks, he talks and he has a beating heart, but he’s not human — he’s the world’s first fully bionic man.

Like Frankenstein’s monster, cobbled together from a hodgepodge of body parts, the bionic man is an amalgam of the most advanced human prostheses — from robotic limbs to artificial organs to a blood-pumping circulatory system.

Million-dollar man

Roboticists Rich Walker and Matthew Godden of Shadow Robot Co. in England led the assembly of the bionic man from prosthetic body parts and artificial organs donated by laboratories around the world.

“Our job was to take the delivery of a large collection of body parts — organs, limbs, eyes, heads — and over a frantic six weeks, turn those parts into a bionic man,” Walker told LiveScience during an interview. But it’s not as simple as connecting everything like Tinkertoys. “You put a prosthetic part on a human who is missing that part,” Walker said. “We had no human; we built a human for the prosthetic parts to occupy.”

The robot, which cost almost $1 million to build, was modeled in some physical aspects after Bertolt Meyer, a social psychologist at the University of Zurich, in Switzerland, who wears one of the world’s most advanced bionic hands. [See Photos of the Bionic Man]

The bionic man has the same prosthetic hand as Meyer — the i-LIMB made by Touch Bionics — with a wrist that can fully rotate and motors in each finger. The hand’s grasping abilities are impressive, but the bionic man still drops drinks sometimes.

“He’s not the world’s best bartender,” Walker said.

The robot sports a pair of robotic ankles and feet from BiOM in Bedford, Mass., designed and worn by bioengineer Hugh Herr of MIT’s Media Lab, who lost his own legs after getting trapped in a blizzard as a teenager.

To support his prosthetic legs, the bionic man wears a robotic exoskeleton dubbed “Rex,” made by REX Bionics in New Zealand. His awkward, jerky walk makes him more Frankensteinian than ever.

Factory-made organs

But it doesn’t end there — the bionic man also has a nearly complete set of artificial organs, including an artificial heart, blood, lungs (and windpipe), pancreas, spleen, kidney and functional circulatory system.

The artificial heart, made by SynCardia Systems in Tucson, Ariz., has been implanted in more than 100 people to replace their ailing hearts for six to 12 months while they wait for a transplant, Walker said. The circulatory system, built by medical researcher Alex Seifalian of University College London,consists of veins and arteries made from a polymer used to create synthetic organs of any shape.

While it might not satisfy the Scarecrow from “The Wizard of Oz,” the bionic man’s “brain” can mimic certain functions of the human brain. He has a retinal prosthesis, made by Second Sight in Sylmar, Calif., which can restore limited sight in blind people. He also sports a cochlear implant, speech recognition and speech production systems.

The engineers equipped the bionic man with a sophisticated chatbot program that can carry on a conversation. The only problem is, it has the persona of “an annoying 13-year-old boy from the Ukraine,” Walker said.

The most unnerving aspect of the bionic man, though, is his prosthetic face. It’s an uncanny replica of Meyer’s face. In fact, when Meyer first saw it, he hated it, describing it on the show as “awkward.”

The bionic man successfully simulates about two-thirds of the human body. But he lacks a few major organs, including a liver, stomach and intestines, which are still too complex to replicate in a lab.

The bionic man brings up some ethical and philosophical questions: Does creating something so humanlike threaten notions of what it means to be human? What amount of body enhancement is acceptable? And is it wrong that only some people have access to these life-extending technologies?

The access issue is especially troublesome, Walker said. “The preservation of life and quality of life has become basically a technical question and an economic question.”

Monkey feels touch with prosthetic hand.

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A sense of touch lets you connect with loved ones, makes your limbs feel your own, and helps you to interact with your surroundings. But people who are paraplegics or have lost limbs have to navigate the world without this most fundamental of sensory inputs.

Sliman Bensmaia at the University of Chicago, Illinois, is working to change that with a new model for transmitting a sense of touch to the brain that bypasses regular routes. He hopes it will be a blueprint for constructing prosthetics that convey touch in the same way that natural limbs do.

One day they'll feel the same <i>(Image: PNAS, 2013)</i>

To start, Bensmaia and his colleagues trained rhesus macaques to focus their gaze in different directions depending on whether their index finger or fourth finger were being prodded.

Microelectrodes were then placed in an area of the brain called the primary somatosensory cortex. This area represents an entire map of the body, with each neuron responsible for sensing when a different part of the skin is touched.

Microelectrodes record the activity pattern of neurons. They can also be used in reverse – to deliver electrical stimulation to make neurons fire.

Fourth finger exercise

Next, the team recorded what activity occurred and where it registered in the somatosensory cortex when a monkey had its index or fourth finger poked.

Then they stimulated the brain using the same pattern of activity. The monkeys reacted as if they had been touched – fixing their gaze in the direction they been taught in response to a poke.

In similar experiments, the monkeys were also able to differentiate between pokes of varying strength to a prosthetic hand that transmitted the information to their brain via the microelectrodes.

“Information about location and pressure of a touch is often unavailable visually or is inadequate to guide motor behaviour for people with prosthetics,” Bensmaia says. “But it is crucial. Without it we crush or drop objects in our grasp.”

He hopes that one day prosthetic sensors will be able to transmit signals to implants in humans that dispatch the correct pattern of electrical pulses to the brain to allow them to sense touch. Such prosthetics, he says, will confer a greater feeling of embodiment – the sense that your limbs feel like a part of your body, and foster richer interactions with the environment.

“Maybe this will help a person touch a loved one for the first time,” Bensmaia says. “That’s powerful.”

Though electrode implants has been used in humans, Bensmaia says that hurdles remain. Implants must be safe and durable enough to remain in the brain over a long period of time, as well as adaptable enough to function as a person’s brain changes with age.

Despite the obstacles, Lee Miller at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, says that Bensmaia’s biomimetic approach holds great promise for prosthetics, which have limited sensory capacity at the moment.

“Bensmaia is trying to reproduce a natural pattern of sensory activity and that’s a big distinction,” he says. “The best approach to conveying touch will likely be imitating as faithfully as possible the brain’s own signalling.”

Scientists Recreate The Sense Of Touch With Direct-To-Brain Electrical Signals .

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We’ve seen some very cool prosthetic arms recently, including ones people are able to control—just as they control biological arms—with their thoughts. So what’s one of the next great frontiers for prosthetics? Letting people experience touches through them, too.

photo of an experimental prosthetic arm

The human sense of touch does a lot more than let people enjoy fresh sheets or soft kitties. It’s also crucial for helping people judge how hard to hold stuff they want to pick up, or whether they’ve got a good grip on something slippery. In a feature published earlier this year, Nature News talked with one prosthetic arm user, Igor Spetic, who accidentally broke dishes and bruised fruit he tried to hold with his device. If he had a prosthesis that had a sense of touch, he told Nature News, “I’d probably lay everything on the countertop and just start grabbing stuff. I’d be so excited.”

Now one research group is reporting a major step toward a touchy-feely prosthetic. A team of researchers from the University of Chicago and Johns Hopkins University performed a series of experiments that showed they could send electrical signals directly to the brains of rhesus macaques and that the macaques were able to interpret the signals as touches on different parts of their hands. Another series of experiments showed rhesus macaques could interpret different direct-to-brain signals as touches of varying pressure. A third explored whether direct-to-brain signals work quickly enough to be able to accurately tell macaques when a prosthetic is touching something and when it stops the touch. (The signals seem to move too slowly to be totally accurate, but the researchers thought of some workarounds, which they discussed in a paper they published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy Sciences.)

The macaques were quickly able to interpret electrical brain stimulation as analogues to physical touches.

The team will surely work to incorporate those findings into a device. For one thing, some of the researchers’ experiments actually involved a prosthetic finger that sent signals to the research monkeys‘ brains. For another, Johns Hopkins University is working on a prototype that’s the most sophisticated touch-enabled prosthesis in the world, with more than 100 sensors, Nature News reports.

There was one especially cool thing the Chicago-Johns Hopkins team demonstrated. While it’s impossible to know exactly what the monkeys feel when they get electrical buzzes to their brains, one series of experiments showed the animals were quickly able to interpret electrical brain stimulation as analogues to physical touches.

First, the researchers taught rhesus macaques to look either left or right after feeling two presses into their hands—say, pressure on the index finger, and then pressure on the pinky finger. After running several trials to make sure the monkeys learned the press-look game as well as they could, the researchers stimulated parts of the monkeys’ brains they’d learned corresponded with different parts of the monkeys’ hands. The two macaques in whom the researchers tested this looked in the correct direction 81 percent and 72 percent of the time, the very first time researchers sent electrical signals to their brains.

This research could help scientists develop touch-enabled prosthetics that send signals that are intuitive for people to interpret, the researchers wrote in their paper.

It’ll be years yet before technology like this will show up in prosthetics for people, however. It is invasive, requiring wiring to the brain, so researchers will have to do a lot to show it’s safe and durable. (Nobody wants to have to undergo frequent brain implants for tune-ups or software updates.) It’s also not clear yet whether electrical signals sent to the brain are able to reproduce touches as specific as human or monkey skin is able to feel. The electric signals could be lower resolution than true touches.

First mind-controlled bionic leg a ‘groundbreaking’ advance.

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After losing his lower right leg in a motorcycle accident four-and-a-half years ago, 32-year-old Zac Vawter has been fitted with an artificial limb that uses neurosignals from his upper leg muscles to control the prosthetic knee and ankle. The motorized limb is the first thought-controlled bionic leg, scientists at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago reported Wednesday in The New England Journal of Medicine.

“This is a groundbreaking development,” says lead author Levi Hargrove, a biomedical engineer and research scientist at RIC. “It allows people to seamlessly transition between walking along level ground and going up and down stairs and slopes.”

Until now, only thought-controlled bionic arms have been available to amputees.

In this Oct. 25, 2012 photo, Zac Vawter, fitted with an experimental "bionic" leg, is silhouetted on the Ledge at the Willis Tower in Chicago. Vawter ...

Brian Kersey / AP
On Oct. 25, 2012 Zac Vawter, fitted with an experimental “bionic” leg, climbed the 103 flights to the top of Willis Tower in Chicago.

When Vawter thinks he wants to move his leg, the brain signal travels down his spinal cord and through peripheral nerves and is picked up by electrodes in the bionic leg. Unlike robotic models currently on the market, the prosthesis allows a normal, smooth gait no matter the incline. Although the cost hasn’t been determined, a version could be available to the more than one million Americans with leg amputations within three to five years, the Chicago scientists said.

“It makes a phenomenal difference,” says Vawter, a software engineer from Yelm, Wash., whose right leg was amputated through the knee in 2009 after he crashed his motorcycle. Aware of the institute’s work on bionic arms, Vawter and his surgeon contacted Hargrove and the team developing the pioneering prosthesis. For nearly three years ending in October, 2012, Vawter would travel to the institute periodically.

Vawter would remove his mechanical leg, slip into the bionic one, and run through a set of experiments the scientists devised, suggesting improvements and providing feedback on what was working and what was not.

 

Now, after multiple revisions to the leg’s software and two major revisions to the leg’s mechanics, Vawter says he can walk up and down stairs the way he did before the accident. With his mechanical leg, Vawter says, “My sound leg goes up every step first, and I’m just dragging the prosthetic leg along behind me.” But with the bionic leg, “I go leg over leg,” he says. “The bionic leg listens to the various signals from my nerves and responds in a much more natural way.”

Some current prosthetic legs are purely mechanical, like Vawter’s; others are robotic and have a motor, a computer, and mechanical sensors that detect how much weight is being put on the prosthesis and the position of the knee. These allow people to walk well but don’t allow people to seamlessly ascend or descend stairs with a normal gait or to reposition their leg while sitting without manually moving it. The thought-controlled bionic leg is much more sophisticated. In additional to mechanical sensors, it has two motors, complex software, and a set of electrodes – essentially antennae – in its socket that pick up the tiny electrical signals that muscles in the upper leg generate when they contract.

Two electrodes pick up signals from the hamstring muscle, where the nerves that had run through Vawter’s lower leg were redirected during the amputation. “So when Zac is thinking about moving his ankle, his hamstring contracts,” says Hargrove.

 

More electrodes pick up signals from other muscles in the residual limb. The complex pattern recognition software contained in the on-board computer interprets these electrical signals from the upper leg as well as mechanical signals from the bionic leg and “figures out what Zac is trying to do,” says Hargrove.

 

The U.S. Army’s Telemedicine and Advanced Technology Research Center funded the Chicago study with an $8 million grant to add neural information to the control systems of advanced robotic leg prostheses. Devising a thought-controlled bionic leg has been more challenging than a thought-controlled bionic arm, says Hargrove.

That’s because the motors must be powerful enough to provide the energy to allow someone to stand and push along — and they must be small. Also, the computer control system must be safe.

“If there is a mistake or error that could cause someone to fall, that could be potentially catastrophic, and we want to avoid that at all costs,” says Hargrove.

The leg is a prototype so Vawter cannot take it home. Error rates in the software are small but need to be made smaller, says Hargrove and the leg itself needs to be made quieter and lighter. In addition, prolonged use can produce chafing where the residual limb contacts the electrodes in the bionic leg’s socket.

The ultimate cost of the final product is unknown, says Hargrove, although upper extremity prostheses range from $20,000 to $120,000. “We are leveraging developments in related industries to make sure we use low-cost components whenever possible,” Hargrove told NBC News.

Careful engineering will make it affordable. His goal is to restore “full ability” to all patients, especially the elderly. “This could mean the difference between living in their home longer and having to go to a nursing home,” says Hargrove.

Touchy Feeling Bionic Hand Closer to Reality.

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bionic-hand-660

A new and better bionic hand under development connects directly to the nervous system and could one day return dexterity and sensation to amputees, researchers say.

In recent years, a plethora of bionic hands have emerged for amputees. However, surveys of those using such artificial hands have revealed that up to 50 percent of amputees do not use the prosthesis regularly, due to poor functionality, appearance and controllability.

NEWS: First Bionic Eye See Light of Day

So, to improve the amount of dexterity and sensation of these bionic hands, scientists reasoned they could use interfaces that link the hands with the nervous system, potentially enabling intuitive control and realistic sensory feedback.

“Our dream is to have Luke Skywalker getting back his hand with normal function,” researcher Silvestro Micera told TechNewsDaily, referencing the hero in “Star Wars” who gets an artificial hand after his real one is cut off. [Brainpower: Human Minds May Soon Control Prosthetic Limbs]

Micera is the head of the translational neural engineering lab at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, Switzerland, which is one of the collaborators helping to develop the new bionic hand.

In a four-week clinical trial, Micera and his colleagues found they could improve the sensory feedback an amputee received from bionics by using electrodes implanted into the median and ulnar nerves in the arm near the stump. This helped deliver feelings of touch.

In addition, the researchers analyzed motor neural activity from the nerves, signals used to help control muscles. They found they could tease out signals related to grasping to help control a prosthetic hand placed near the amputee but not physically attached to the person’s arm. In other words, it may be possible to develop an artificial hand that can transmit signals to and respond to data from the brain.

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“We could be on the cusp of providing new and more effective clinical solutions to amputees in the next years,” Micera said.

Micera and his colleagues also announced a new clinical trial that will soon connect the prosthetic hand directly to a patient as part of the Italian Ministry of Health‘s NEMESIS project. They hope to further improve sensory feedback and overall control of bionics this way.

A key problem is how electricity from the electrodes can inflame cells, forcing the body to grow tissue around the electrodes that dampen signals to and from the bionic hand. Micera suggested drugs or coatings on the electrodes might help prevent such inflammation.

Natural hands normally possess 22 degrees of freedom, meaning they can flex 22 different ways — for instance, they can spread fingers apart. While 22 degrees of freedom are currently unrealistic for prosthetic hands, the four or five different grasping tasks the research team’s device can provide can be very helpful, Micera said.

In the future, artificial hands may connect not only with nerves in the periphery of the nervous system, such as those in the limbs, but may also link with the spinal cord. “A hybrid solution that combines both approaches may be the way to go,” Micera said.

NEWS: Bionic Legs Allows Paraplegic to Stand and Walk

Future research might also have amputees prepare for what bionic hands might feel like using virtual-reality experiments that could help them reconstruct their body images. “In the medium term, we’d like to have virtual-reality environments for training patients,” Micera said.

Still, much work remains before artificial hands are as capable as natural ones.

“I think the Luke Skywalker hand is probably 20 or 30 years away, maybe even more,” Micera said.

The scientists recently detailed their findings at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Boston.

Source: Discovery channel