DARPA's Mind-Controlled Prosthetic Arm Could Be on the Market in Four Years
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Re: DARPA's Mind-Controlled Prosthetic Arm Could Be on the Market in Four Years
#2Cue the Dr. Strangelove jokes.
Re: DARPA's Mind-Controlled Prosthetic Arm Could Be on the Market in Four Years
#3This looks like the DEKA arm. Here is Dean Kamen talking about it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AoY1cItRiHA
Even if it isn't the same thing, this is a pretty interesting video.
Re: DARPA's Mind-Controlled Prosthetic Arm Could Be on the Market in Four Years
#4If this turns out to be a real FDA approved implant, the potential to improve the lives of paralyzed people is staggering.
Re: DARPA's Mind-Controlled Prosthetic Arm Could Be on the Market in Four Years
#5Did Arnold Schwarzenegger's face flash through anyone else's mind while reading this?
Re: DARPA's Mind-Controlled Prosthetic Arm Could Be on the Market in Four Years
#6So I totally want this to actually happen. However, they gloss over all of the actually hard parts. Cool, DEKA's built a sweet anthropomorphic robotic arm. I have no doubt that part works. But you don't just jump to running a human study from that: first, you do it in non-human primates and show that they can effective control the arm with the implant. Then you show that they can interpret feedback from the arm stimulated into their brain. Then you show that the implant is stable and immunologically accepted over a long period of time (warning: deep, hard unsolved problem). Then you show that they continuously integrate it into their body representation (not necessarily hinted by the prior control study). Then you cautiously do a human surgery and see if they can control it, and the brain doesn't reject the implant after a year. Then five patients. Then apply for FDA approval, expedited or otherwise.
AFAIK there's never been an implant study done using the Luke arm. Therefore we've never tried to build control models from cortical activity for it. That's a hard problem in and of itself. Jumping straight to a 5-person human study is insane. Furthermore, the idea that human patients are going to get intracortical feedback from the arm is crazytalk. It's just not happening. Electrical stimulation cooks the brain and causes seizures, and optical stimulation requires gene therapy (!) and has all kinds of long-term problems right now.
TL;DR: awesome I hope it works. They'll bring a needed device to market and solve about 10-15 of the hard problems of brain-machine interfacing for us at the same time!
Re: DARPA's Mind-Controlled Prosthetic Arm Could Be on the Market in Four Years
#7This looks like the DEKA arm. Here is Dean Kamen talking about it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AoY1cItRiHA Even if it isn't the same thing, this is a pretty interesting video.
I worked at DEKA for a while. Although I didn't work on the Luke arm, I got to see a few demos. It's my understanding that the control system is very loosely coupled to the user inputs. I think it's an expansion of the control mechanism for the iBot, which took input from hundreds of sensors but could be controlled with just a joystick and a single button. The Luke arm currently is controlled by pressure sensors in the shoes and on the chest, so you wiggle your toes and flex your muscles to command the arm. It also has very impressive force feedback. But other input mechanisms and feedback systems could be implemented, including direct mental manipulation.
Edit: here's a good demo video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R4X_l2XOz8g
Re: DARPA's Mind-Controlled Prosthetic Arm Could Be on the Market in Four Years
#8Cue the Dr. Strangelove jokes.
More like the Six Million Dollar Man theme...
Re: DARPA's Mind-Controlled Prosthetic Arm Could Be on the Market in Four Years
#9So I totally want this to actually happen. However, they gloss over all of the actually hard parts. Cool, DEKA's built a sweet anthropomorphic robotic arm. I have no doubt that part works. But you don't just jump to running a human study from that: first, you do it in non-human primates and show that they can effective control the arm with the implant. Then you show that they can interpret feedback from the arm stimu…
Indeed. I have no idea why they would want to include solving the "don't cook the neurons" problem in their road-map to a usable product; there are other feedback methods available.
A haptic display of some flavor would certainly be plenty to close the loop in controlling the important variables like "are any of the motors encountering resistance" and "how much pressure am I putting on this thing I'm squeezing in my robot hand." A more advanced haptic display should allow enough feedback signals to hold much more than that. Heck, if one is going to go electrically stimulating neurons, better to do that to sensory neurons in the user's skin than in their skull.
Re: DARPA's Mind-Controlled Prosthetic Arm Could Be on the Market in Four Years
#10So I totally want this to actually happen. However, they gloss over all of the actually hard parts. Cool, DEKA's built a sweet anthropomorphic robotic arm. I have no doubt that part works. But you don't just jump to running a human study from that: first, you do it in non-human primates and show that they can effective control the arm with the implant. Then you show that they can interpret feedback from the arm stimu…
Electrical stimulation cooks the brain and causes seizures
From Wikipedia: deep brain stimulation has been FDA-approved for tremor since 1997. More treatments have been approved since, like Parkinson's, dystonia, major depression, and chronic pain. https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Deep_brain_st...
Then you show that they continuously integrate it into their body representation
This part is easy, isn't it? People integrate tools into their body image innately and easily. I don't think that will be very difficult.