A World of Awesome Mind-Controlled Prostheses Is Closer Than You Think
Last month, DARPA announced the latest breakthrough in brain-controlled artificial limbs: a robotic arm that a user can actually feel.
It works via neural implants that connect to a computer through an
interface top of the user's skull, and sends singals from there to the
arm telling it how to move.
This
probably isn't the first time you've heard of such a thing. Over the
past several years, teams around the world have devised brain-machine
interfaces that make the seemingly impossible a reality. Back in 2012,
the program that funded this breakthrough, Revolutionizing Prosthetics,
made news when a quadriplegic with neural implants manipulated a robotic
arm just by thinking about it, and an amputee felt the relative
resilience of various objects with the help of electrical stimulation of
his peripheral nerves. Last year, a paraplegic kicked off
the FIFA World Cup in Sao Paulo with the help of an exoskeleton
controlled by a computer reading signals from an electrode-studded cap.
Even DIYers are getting in on the brain-controlled robot action through
the open-source brain-computer interface (OpenBCI) project, which launched last year via a Kickstarter campaign.
With
these spectacular successes, it seems only a matter of time before
brain-controlled artificial limbs that move like natural ones and feed
sensations to the brain are as commonplace as today's unconnected
prosthetics. So how far are we, really, for a world of Skywalker-esque
robot hands?
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