When I was a kid, I loved watching the Six Million Dollar Man. I always wondered how I could get a good bionic arm like Steve Austin. It's that childhood interest and my exploration in robotics that made this article an interesting read for me.
Scientists at Pittsburgh University have create a robotic arm that can be controlled via thought.
...monkeys had tiny probes inserted into their brains and had their limbs restrained - but were then able to manipulate the robotic arm...
Quite amazing that the monkeys were able to control the arm to do things like feed themselves. Imagine how amazing this would be for people who have lost a limb or the use of their limbs? To read the complete article, click here.
Is this really something new like a link to actual existing motor control lobes, or is it just a more dangerous but sexier operation that's really no different than what Barbara Brown did back in the 70's when she used bio-feedback sensors to control model trains?
Seems to me, where they say the subjects had to learn/teach the control interface, that this isn't control by thought in the same way as the earlier experiments with mouse-positions using cerebral eye-tracking signals (ie, you think 'left' and it goes left) but just a bio-feedback where we can use arbitrary cells to trigger the servos, and we still have to learn how to control the cybernetics.
If it's the latter, then if it was my arm or leg, I'd much rather they just stick removeable neuro-sensor pads to muscle cells on my stump instead of them piercing my skull to implant synthetic probes in my brain :)
Posted by: mrG | February 19, 2005 at 11:45 AM