A typical prosthetic arm still looks essentially the way it has for more than a century, with a simple hook that can open and close to squeeze and hold objects. An artificial arm now in development works very differently: The hand on the device is connected to a bracelet that can read muscle signals in an amputee’s stump, so that person can move, tap, and squeeze artificial fingers simply by thinking.
“When you think you want to move—you want to rotate your wrist, or you want to move your fingers—the signal travels from your brain down your spinal cord, and then out the peripheral nerves from the spinal cord into your arm,” says Tyler Hayes, CEO of Atom Limbs, the startup bringing the device to market. “Even when someone has lost or damaged a limb, those nerves are still there and they’re still firing into muscles, it’s just that there’s no real hand left to move. So we listen to the electrical field emanating from your arm, from your…
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Source : fastcompany.com
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