Monday, September 8, 2008

Cyborg woman has feelings in fake arm.


This is crazy. She can control objects with HER MIND. WHAT HAVE WE DONE?!! From ABC News:
As a result of an experimental surgery, Mitchell has become the first real "Bionic Woman": part human, part computer.

[...] The "targeted reinnervation" surgery was developed by Dr. Todd Kuiken of the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago. It was a radical idea: a robotic arm controlled not by a patient's stump or shoulder, but by a patient's thoughts.

[...] During the six-hour procedure in 2006, doctors took the severed and dormant nerves in Mitchell's shoulder, nerves that are used to control the movement of her arm, and put them under the muscle in her chest.

They wanted the nerves to reawaken and work her chest muscle. The doctors eventually used the electrical nerve signals from that chest muscle to power a new bionic arm.

Now, when Mitchell wants to move her arm, she thinks "move." The signal travels from her brain to the muscle in her chest. According to Kuiken, Mitchell's chest muscle then contracts and "lets tiny bits of electricity out."

There are tiny antennas built into the robotic arm, which pick up these electrical signals. The signals then go to an internal computer that decodes them and tells the artificial arm what to do. It's almost instantaneous.

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