Amputee scales 103 floors with mind-controlled 'bionic leg'

edition.cnn.com

11–12 of 12 posts

Re: Amputee scales 103 floors with mind-controlled 'bionic leg'

#11

Post by Osmium » Mon, Nov 05, 2012, 2:56 PM UTC

haraball wrote: post #10

Osmium wrote: post #9

Given the current political climate, there's no way I can make a comment like this without it sounding political, but here it goes... It seems a shame to me that technology like this is not available to all amputees. I can only imagine the frustration I'd feel if I lost an arm or a leg and couldn't afford this, and had to settle for a "dumb" prosthesis instead. And I can only imagine this problem getting worse in the…

Bionic prosthetic limbs like this is very hard to control, that's why it's newsworthy that a man can climb 103 stairs like this. To be able to use something like this requires lots of training and calibration, so it's not easy to mass produce them (yet).

And all that training and calibration requires highly-specialised workers to be able to help you. So it's more than just the cost of the device itself. Even if you could mass-produce them, I imagine they'd still need a lot of tailoring to the individual.

I actually saw someone using a motorised prosthesis for the first time recently, and it was very impressive to watch. I'm optimistic for the future, I just hope everyone who needs such technology can get access to it.

Re: Amputee scales 103 floors with mind-controlled 'bionic leg'

#12

Post by haraball » Mon, Nov 05, 2012, 4:44 PM UTC

Osmium wrote: post #11

haraball wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bionic prosthetic limbs like this is very hard to control, that's why it's newsworthy that a man can climb 103 stairs like this. To be able to use something like this requires lots of training and calibration, so it's not easy to mass produce them (yet).

And all that training and calibration requires highly-specialised workers to be able to help you. So it's more than just the cost of the device itself. Even if you could mass-produce them, I imagine they'd still need a lot of tailoring to the individual. I actually saw someone using a motorised prosthesis for the first time recently, and it was very impressive to watch. I'm optimistic for the future, I just hope ever…

Exactly. I've done some lab work on reading muscle activity signals trough the skin, and the signals from the test subjects were very individual.

The mass produced prostethic limbs with control systems are mostly mechanical and slow, e.g. the users are using the remaning stump of their limb to push buttons on the inside of the casing.

To use neural networks or some other kind of machine learning to map the muscle signals to the wanted movement for the prosthesis would be a really interesting problem to work on.

Post reply on HN