I've been reading about her. Such a great ambassador for the disabled. Anyway cool video about her arms
Girl with advanced robotic arms
- Thread starter Gingerbread Demon
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Fascinating. And it's great that it's theoretically available to everyone through the NHS. I doubt Americans would be so lucky. (I've often thought it'd be cool to have bionic limbs, if not for all the unpleasant and painful stuff that would have to happen to me in order to require them. I'd be sorely tempted to ask them to install sound chips that made the Six Million Dollar Man ta-ta-ta-tang sound when I exerted myself.)
They didn't ask some of my questions, like whether she can move the fingers individually well enough to type or play an instrument or something. But seeing the detached hand crawl around remotely like The Addams Family's Thing was wild.
As a writer, naturally the first thing that occurs to me when learning these are wirelessly controlled and computerized is, what happens if somebody hacks them?
They didn't ask some of my questions, like whether she can move the fingers individually well enough to type or play an instrument or something. But seeing the detached hand crawl around remotely like The Addams Family's Thing was wild.
As a writer, naturally the first thing that occurs to me when learning these are wirelessly controlled and computerized is, what happens if somebody hacks them?
I watched the video again and you can see as she was sitting her fingers did seem to move about kind of like a subconscious thing on her part. That was kind of freaky watching that. They're not quiet either. You can hear the motor noises as they move. I thought they would be a lot quieter.
I was wondering if that was natural or a "passing" behavior learned by emulating how other people move their arms.
Vindication for decades of Hollywood sound designers putting servo noises on robotic movements.
That's a lot of progress in terms of Bionic Arms.
I definitely wasn't expecting the remote Hand Operation, once she gains better control of her fingers individually, that'll be pretty cool if she could do the Adams Family hand crawl.
I definitely wasn't expecting the remote Hand Operation, once she gains better control of her fingers individually, that'll be pretty cool if she could do the Adams Family hand crawl.
She's had prosthetic hands for most of her life, so I doubt that's an issue. I looked into it, and multi-articulating hands (those with individual finger movement) can't really be controlled the same way human hands are. They're triggered to open and close by a myoelectric signal from muscle contraction in the arm, but those contractions can't control fingers individually. A multi-articulated robotic hand can be programmed with specific finger movement patterns -- you set it to a particular grip pattern, and then trigger it with the arm muscle contraction.
They also have other limitations, like not being water-resistant (usually) and having to be charged every night, and being relatively fragile what with all the delicate moving parts. Apparently their main benefit is that they allow gripping irregularly shaped objects more gently than more basic prosthetics, but it seems that to a large extent, hands like this are more about appearing closer to "normal" than really being all that useful for the wearer. At least, it could be a good idea to have different kinds of prosthetic limb for different needs.
Introduction to Multi-Articulating Myoelectric Hands
Multi-articulating myoelectric hands are available from a variety of manufacturers in multiple sizes and configurations. Learn more.
www.armdynamics.com
The longer the time period between the amputation and receiving a prosthetic factor in?
If someone was knocked out and woke up with an even more advanced prosthetic attached at a surgical level—nerve-to-fiber—I would think no training would be needed…you instinctually would reach out for something and it would work right away.
If someone was knocked out and woke up with an even more advanced prosthetic attached at a surgical level—nerve-to-fiber—I would think no training would be needed…you instinctually would reach out for something and it would work right away.
As I mentioned, the girl has been wearing a variety of prosthetics since she was very young. And what I'm talking about is a fundamental limitation in how myoelectric limbs work. All they can do is react to a muscle contraction in the arm that tells them to open or close, little more than an on-off switch. You have to preset the hand to perform a specific finger motion in response to getting the "on" signal.
I doubt that very much. From what I can tell, it takes months for nerve tissues to regrow and heal from nerve graft surgery, so the same would go for grafting nerves to prosthetic fibers -- and could you even do it that way? Nerves don't literally work like electric wires, so you'd need some kind of interface that would translate one signal into the other, and it would probably take a lot of time and physical therapy to learn to make it work. If someone were in a coma for months, their limbs would atrophy and they'd need physical therapy anyway to recover their mobility.
And that's not even taking the physical and emotional trauma of amputation into account. If someone woke up and found their own limb had been replaced with a prosthetic, no matter how advanced, that would be traumatizing even aside from the physical trauma the body would experience even while unconscious. That would further complicate the process of convincing the brain to accept the new limb as part of its body.
There was another one I used to follow on Youtube Rebekah Marine not sure what's happened to her but she also used to promote these as she lost her right arm
For some reason, Dr. Strangelove comes to mind.
I was thinking of the recent episode of CBS's Watson where a patient had a rare "alien hand syndrome" where one hand acted like it had a mind of its own. Also old movies like The Hands of Orlac where the protagonist gets a dead murderer's hands grafted on and they turn out to have murderous intent.
Although as I've learned, the arms don't have full mobility anyway, so there's not much a hacker could do to cause harm with them. Unless maybe the wearer were driving a car and the hacker made the hands let go of the wheel at a critical moment, or something.
