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Natural Gait With Prosthetic Connected To Nervous System
A new design for a robotic prosthetic leg has been created by MIT researchers, one which achieves a more natural gait by actually connecting with the nervous system of the user.
A new prosthesis, driven by the nervous system, helps people with amputation walk naturally. Using a new type of surgical intervention and neuroprosthetic interface, MIT researchers, in collaboration with colleagues from Brigham and Women’s Hospital, have shown that a natural walking gait is achievable using a prosthetic leg fully driven by the body’s own nervous system. The surgical amputation procedure reconnects muscles in the residual limb, which allows patients to receive “proprioceptive” feedback about where their prosthetic limb is in space.
In his interesting 1949 story The Cybernetic Brain, science fiction writer Charles Recour describes a prosthetic leg with a brain:
It was an artificial leg, so cleverly and so artfully designed that it could hardly be told from a real one. Dr. Schmidt handed it to Larry. “Feel it,” he said, beaming, “it’s made of plastic and titanium. It doesn’t weigh very much.”Larry hefted the incredibly real contraption. To the touch, it felt as if it were made of human flesh. Its lightness was due to its being made of titanium, a metal as strong as steel, but much lighter. Its upper portion carried a web strap-and-belt arrangement for attaching, to the thigh.
('The Cybernetic Brain' by Charles Recour)"[Dr. Clydestone] will bring out the desired nerve endings from the end of the stump. He’ll connect them through platinum wires to little cable connectors... to seven nerve-endings protruding from his flesh, terminating, in ordinary electrical connections!"
...The leg was to function, in a way, as a servo-mechanism operated by Larry’s brain, through the mediation of the electronic brain in the leg. It might be said that the artificial leg was a robot.
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