The Future of Neuroscience
Imagine living a life without a left leg or right arm. Normal everyday tasks as simple as tying your shoes and walking across the room are made increasingly more difficult. Is there any hope to alleviate the pain for patients living in these conditions?
Neuroscience presents an opportunity to give back to amputees, paralysed patients, or those born with birth defects that have been affected their whole life. It starts with the promise of creating robotic legs or arms that mimic the natural movement of human limbs. With extended research, there is a chance that one day, these patients can utilize robotics to live life independently.
Technology of the Future
The National Institutes of Health are for research in robotic tools to help the visually or phsically impaired. These include a robotic cane to help the visually impaired navigate, a robotic catheter to help treat atrial fibrillation (irregular heartbeat), and an ankle exoskeleton to improve the mobility of impaired individuals. Assistive robotic technology is being looked into in order to provide aid for patients who are dependent with the possibility of changing their lives for the better.
Robotic Arms
Early in its development, robotic arms were controlled by monkey with a robotic arm connected to their brain. With just their thoughts, they were able to control the arm to grab and bring food to their mouths. Scientists worked to improve this use of robotics and even opened it up to the possibility of human use. Developing an arm that responds to the brain is anything but easy. Unlike moving a cursor across the screen, a 2-dimensional process, the robotic arm involves moving the arm, elbow, and hand all at the same time. This increases the complexity of the machine that researchers are dealing with, but more research is being done to maximize the efficiency of these robotic arms.
Nearly 2 years ago, Cathy Hutchinson is a tetraplegic- she could not move her arms or legs or even speak after a terrifying stroke that disconnected her brain from the rest of her body 15 years prior. The research project called BrainGate2 was able to develop an arm that allowed Cathy to take a sip of her morning coffee. The BrainGate team, along with scientists from Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School and the German Aerospace Center, were able to give Cathy a piece of her movement back thanks to neuroscience and robotics. They hope to develop more devices to improve their design even further and also make wireless arms instead of having the machine be directly plugged into the user's brain.
Robotic Legs
Similar to robotic arms, legs have been created and improved to aid the paralyzed and keep them moving from one place to another. Having a robotic leg that could respond to changes of terrain, decrease hip effort, and account for stumbles can greatly benefit amputees. It is a drastic step from passive legs such as the conventional artificial leg. The sensory nerves that would usually send signals to, for example, the ankle, is hooked up to the robotic leg. When the brain sends signals to the "ankle", it causes a muscle to contract, a message that the robotic leg retrieves and moves according to impulses that it picked up called proprioception. This process is called targeted muscle reinnervation and contributes to studies that are expected to be implimented in the next three to five years.
