What are Prosthetic Devices?

Intelligent prosthetics, also known as neuroprosthetics, bioelectronic devices, refer to doctors using modern bioelectronic technology to connect the human nervous system with devices such as cameras, microphones, motors, etc. for patients to replace this by embedding and listening to brain instructions Artificial devices with missing or damaged parts of the human body.

Intelligent prosthetics, also known as neuroprosthetics, bioelectronic devices, refer to doctors using modern bioelectronic technology to connect the human nervous system with devices such as cameras, microphones, motors, etc. for patients to replace this by embedding and listening to brain instructions Artificial devices with missing or damaged parts of the human body.

Chinese name

Intelligent prosthesis

Alias

Neuroprosthetics

Make up

Bioelectronic device

For people

People with damaged or lost muscles and bones

Principles of Intelligent Prosthetic Technology

Even if muscles and bones are damaged or lost, the brain regions and nerves that once controlled them will continue to survive. For many people with disabilities, the brain area and nerves corresponding to the severed limb are waiting to be connected, just like a telephone line with a phone torn. Doctors have begun using magical surgery to connect these human structures to devices such as cameras, microphones, and motors for patients. As a result, the blind can see, the deaf can listen, and Amanda can handle housework with both hands. The machines they use are called neuroprosthetics, orscientists are increasingly using this popular termbioelectronic devices. This is a meticulous job that requires a series of trials and errors. Although scientists understand the possibility of connecting machines to ideas, maintaining this connection is very difficult.

Intelligent prostheses should have the following characteristics

(1) It can automatically adjust to make the prosthesis closer to the original limb function;

(2) With good simulation modeling, beautiful and durable.

News about smart prostheses

More useful ones include the kind of prosthetic that Amanda Kitts voluntarily experimented with-the brain is controlled, not the body part that is normally unrelated to hand extensions. A technique called "targeted muscle innervation and reconstruction" uses artificial nerves remaining after amputation to control artificial limbs. It was first tested on a patient in 2002. Four years later, when Amanda was in bed in a car accident, her husband Tommy Kitts read the report online. When the accident happened, a truck smashed her car and crushed her left arm below her elbow.

At the "Children's House Learning Center" near Northville, Tennessee, USA, Amanda Kitts was surrounded by children aged four or five as soon as she entered the classroom. "Hey, how are my darlings today?" She said, patting this shoulder and caressing her hair. Amanda is a slim and energetic woman who has been running this and two other nurseries for almost 20 years. She crouched and talked to a little girl, resting her hands on her knees.

"Robot arm!" Several children cried.

"You still remember this," Amanda said as she stretched out her left arm. She opened her palms upwards, accompanied by a slight buzz, and could not hear without attention. She flexed her elbows, and there was another buzz.

"Let it do something stupid!" Said one girl. "Stupid? Remember how I shook hands with you?" Amanda said, stretching her arms and turning her wrists. A boy hesitantly reached out and touched her finger. He touched flesh-colored plastic with his fingers flexed slightly inward. Under the skin are three motors, a metal frame, and a sophisticated electronics system. The top of this equipment is a white plastic hood attached to the middle of Amanda's biceps brace, covering a stump-almost only her left arm was lost in a 2006 car accident. Already.

Almost, but not just that. In her brain, beneath the level of consciousness, there is a good image of that arm, like a ghost. When Amanda thought about bending her elbows, the ghost arm moved. The nerve impulses came quickly from her brain, received by the electrode sensor in the white plastic cover and converted into a signal for the motor to start, so the elbow of the robot arm flexed.

"Actually I don't need to think about it. I just let it move." Amanda, 40, said. In addition to this standard type of prosthesis, she also has a more experimental and more controllable one. "I lost my heart after the car accident, and I do nt understand why God treats me so hard. But these days I am always elated, because they are constantly improving this arm. One day I can use it to sense things, or in children I tuned for the beat when I sang. "

"I was angry, sad, and uninteresting. I just couldn't accept it," she said. But Tommy told her that there was a new type of prosthesis in Chicago, which gave a glimmer of hope. "At the time it seemed that this was our best choice, much stronger than the clumsy ordinary prosthetic arm." Tommy said, "Amanda got excited when he heard that." Soon they sat down to Chicago aircraft.

Amanda Kitts is a member of Tomorrow. Part of the population's body was missing or damaged, and replaced with devices embedded in the nervous system and obeying the brain's instructions. For example, if the plastic cover on Amanda's broken arm is shifted, even a little bit may cause her to close her fingers. Nonetheless, bioelectronic devices represent a quantum leap in technology, and researchers are now able to recover the physical functions of people with disabilities that they would never have thought of before.

"The core of this work is this: repair." Joseph Panclazio, director of neuroengineering at the American Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, said, "A patient with a spinal injury can eat in a restaurant without being fed, and others also Nothing unusual, this is my definition of success. "

In the office of Robert Lipschultz of the Chicago Rehabilitation Center (RIC), the history of human attempts to repair the body is displayed on shelves in the form of artificial prostheses, legs and feet. "The basic technology of the prosthetic arm has not changed much in the past 100 years," he said. "The materials are different. We have replaced leather with plastic but the basic structure remains the same: a bunch of hooks and hinges, with ropes Or a motor to drive it and use a lever to control it. Many people who came back from Iraq without arms and legs received such a guy. Hey, try on. "

It turned out to be a prosthetic limb of the left shoulder arm. The shoulder part is a breastplate, which is fixed to the chest with a strap; the arm is hinged at the shoulder and elbow, and the end is a metal clamp. To extend your arm, you have to turn your head to the left, press a joystick with your chin, and throw your hands out with a little throwing motion. It's true that there are so many awkward things. And heavy. Twenty minutes later, the neck was painful due to the quirky posture and strenuous pressing of the lever. Many amputees end up staying away from such prosthetics.

Todd Kuiken is a physician and biomedical engineer at the Chicago Rehabilitation Center

Smart prosthetic ankle

, Responsible for the development of bioelectronic prosthetics. He knew that nerves in the amputee's stump could still transmit signals from the brain. He also knew that the computer inside the prosthesis could direct the motor to move. The problem is how to make the connection. Nerves conduct electrical signals, but cannot be directly connected to computer data lines. (Nerve fibers and metal wires do not work together, and open wounds where the wires enter the body can become a high-risk channel for infection.)

Kuiken needed to find an amplifier to boost the signal from the nerve, so that he didn't have to ask for it directly. He found it in the muscles. When the muscles contract, an electrical pulse is released, which is enough to be sensed by electrodes attached to the skin. He developed a technique that removes the severed nerve from the original limb damage and transfers it to other muscles that have the proper signal amplification effect.

Intelligent prosthesis

In October 2006, Kuiken began connecting for Amanda. The first step is to retain the major nerves that were previously distributed throughout the arm. "These nerves were originally responsible for the movement of the arms and hands, but now I have to find four additional muscle areas and transfer them over," Kuiken said. These nerves originate from the motor cortex of Amanda (a rough image of the limb is stored here), and stop abruptly at the end of the residual arm, just like a cut telephone line. After a complicated operation, they were re-inserted into different areas of the upper arm muscles by a surgeon and grew millimeter-by-millimeter in the following months, taking root in their respective "new homes."

"After three months, I started to feel a slight itch and convulsions," Amanda said. "After four months, when I touched my upper arm, I could really feel different parts of my hand. I touched in different positions and felt the corresponding Every finger. "What she felt was actually the" ghost arm "embedded in her brain, and it was now connected to flesh and blood. Amanda thought that when she moved the "ghost finger", the real muscles of her upper arm would contract.

After another month, she installed her first bioelectronic arm, and the electrodes were hidden in a plastic cover around the broken arm to capture muscle signals. The challenge here is how to translate these signals into instructions for moving the elbows and palms. From Amanda's small upper arm, a variety of electronic "noise" gushes, mixed with signals such as "straighten elbows" or "rotate wrists." The microprocessor installed in the prosthetic arm must be carefully programmed to pick out the correct signal and send it to the corresponding motor.

Because of Amanda's "ghost arm", filtering these signals is possible. In a laboratory in the rehabilitation center, engineer Blair Locke made minor programming adjustments. He asked Amanda to remove the prosthetic arm and put electrodes on her remaining arm. She stood in front of a large flat-screen TV with an arm floating on a blue background-this was the reflection of the "ghost arm". The electrodes receive instructions from Amanda's brain to the remaining arm, and the arm on the screen moves.

Locke lowered her voice-so as not to hinder Amanda's concentration-and let her turn her hands over her palms. On the screen, flip your palms inward. "Now straighten your wrists, palms up," he said. The hands on the screen moved again. "Is it better than last time?" She asked. "Yeah, the signal is strong." Amanda smiled. Next, Locke asked her to put her thumbs together with the other four fingers. The hands on the screen did. Amanda's eyes widened: "Oh, I didn't know I could do this before!" Once the muscle signal corresponding to a specific action is identified, you can set up a computer program for the prosthetic arm to search for this Signal and activate the corresponding motor when found.

The place where Amanda practiced using the prosthetic arm was downstairs in Kuiken's office. It was an apartment set up by an occupational therapist, which contained a variety of appliances that disabled people who had a prosthetic limb might use on a daily basis. A kitchen with a stove, a drawer with metal utensils, a bed, a cupboard with a clothes rack, a toilet, and a staircase are all utensils that people inadvertently use every day, but it creates great resistance for people who have lost a certain limb. . Amanda's action of making a peanut butter sandwich can be stunned. She rolled up her sleeves and exposed the plastic cover of the prosthetic arm, and the movement was very smooth: hold up a slice of bread with that intact arm, grab the knife with the fingers of the prosthetic arm, bend her elbows, and wipe the peanut butter on and off .

"It wasn't easy at first," she said. "I worked hard, but my hands often didn't go right." But as she worked hard, the more she used her prosthetic arm, the more natural her movements became. What Amanda wants most now is the perception of a prosthetic arm. It will be helpful for many activities, including one of her favorite things to do-drinking coffee. "The problem with paper cups is that my fake hand keeps pinching until I hold them tightly, and it does nt stop holding them," she said. "Once at Starbucks, I went out of fashion and grabbed with my fake hands. Paper cups, "puffed".

Kuiken said that she hopes to get this kind of consciousness, but still rely on her "ghost arm". The Chicago Rehabilitation Center, in collaboration with bioengineers at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, has been developing a new type of prosthetics for patients like Amanda, which is not only more flexible-with more motors and joints-refers to There is also a pressure sensing pad at the end. Some thin rods, similar to piston rods, are connected to the induction pads and abut against Amanda's stump.

The greater the force on the hand, the stronger the "ghost finger" feel. "This way I can detect how tight my hands are," she said. With the speed of the thin rod vibration, she can also distinguish whether the object touched by her finger is rough (such as sandpaper) or smooth (such as glass). "I went to Chicago to try it out, and I really like it," she said. "I want them to take me home now. But it's more complicated than my prosthesis at home, and they can't give it to me at ease. "Eric Schlump is different from Amanda. He doesn't need prosthetic limbs. He only needs to resume his natural arm. Since Schlump broke his neck and became quadriplegic in 1992, they haven't moved by themselves. However, the 40-year-old Ohio man can now pinch his knife and fork.

He can do this thanks to an implanted device developed by biomedical engineer Hunter Peckham of Case Western Reserve University. "Our goal is to restore the grip of our hands," Peckham said. "Hands are the key to independent living."

Schlump's finger muscles and the nerves that control them still exist, but signals from the brain to the neck are cut off. Peckham led other staff members to insert eight tiny electrodes from Schlump's chest, and walked under the skin of the right arm to the finger muscles. When the muscles on his chest contract, a signal is triggered, which is transmitted to a small computer hanging on his wheelchair via a wireless transmitter, which interprets the signal and sends it back to a receiver implanted in his chest. Passed to the hand, the signal instructed the muscles of the fingers to tighten and holdall in 1 microsecond. "I can grab my fork and eat by myself," Schremp said. "It makes a lot of sense."

About 250 people have been treated with this experimental technology. But another type of bioelectronic device has shown that the combination of brain and machine can be powerful and stand the test of time. In the past 30 years, nearly 200,000 people have installed it worldwide. This is a cochlear implant. Aiden Kenny is one of the patients undergoing implantation. His mother Tammy Kenny remembers learning that her baby couldn't even use a hearing aid. "I just held him in my arms and cried," she said, "I know he can't hear me. How will he communicate with me in the future? Once, my husband hit two iron pans against each other, hoping that he would A little reaction. "Aiden didn't hear the noise at all.

He could hear it. In February 2009, a surgeon at Johns Hopkins University twisted into a thin wire with 22 electrodes in each cochlea (the cochlea is the inner ear structure normally responsible for inducing sound wave vibrations). Aiden's microphone receives sound and sends the signal to the electrodes, which in turn sends the signal directly to the nerves.

"One month after the operation, the day the doctor activated the implant, we found out that he had responded to the sound," said Tammy Kenny. "He turned his head to my voice. It was amazing." He is cooperating with therapeutics to quickly catch up with his peers who are hearing well.

Following the cochlear device, bioelectronic eyes may soon be available. A few years ago, retinal pigment degeneration deprived Joe Ann Louis' vision, a disease that destroys the rods and cones in the eye that are responsible for photoreception. However, she recovered part of her vision thanks to the research of ophthalmologist Mark Humayun.

Patients with this eye disease usually have a portion of the inner retina that is not damaged, as is Joe Ann Louis. This layer of retinal structure is filled with bipolar cells and ganglion cells. Normally it collects signals from the outer rod cells and cone cells, and then transfers them to the fibers emitted from the optic nerve. No one had previously known what kind of signal the inner retina uses, or how to deliver it an image it can interpret. In 1992, Hu Mayun began to attach tiny electrode arrays to the retinas of such patients during the operation, which was a trial for a short time.

"I told them to track a point with their eyes, and they did it." He said, "They can see things that line up and columns." After another decade of experiments, Hu Mayun and colleagues developed a system, Named "Argos" (giant in Greek mythology, with hundreds of eyes). The patient wears a pair of sunglasses with a miniature camera and wireless transmitter. The image signal is sent to a computer on the belt, converted into electrical pulses that can be read by ganglion cells, and sent to a receiver placed behind the ear. From there, a wire was drawn into the eye and led to a square 16-electrode array gently attached to the surface of the retina. The pulses fire the electrodes, the electrodes excite the cells, and the brain does the rest, allowing the first patients to see the edges and rough outlines of the objects.

In the fall of 2006, Hu Mayun and the "Second Vision" company he worked with joined an international team to increase the number of electrodes in the array to 60. Like cameras with more pixels, the new array produces sharper images. Louis from Texas was one of the first patients to get a new array. "Now I can see the outline of the tree again," she said. "In my impression it was the last thing I saw before I became blind. Now I can see the branches sticking out in all directions."

Researchers have taken the concept of neuroprosthetics a step further and started using it to assist the brain itself. Scientists participating in a "brain gate" project are trying to connect the motor cortex of patients with complete disability directly to the computer, enabling them to manipulate external objects with their minds. Subjects have been able to move the cursor on the computer screen in this way. Researchers even plan to develop an artificial hippocampus that replaces the hippocampal structure that stores memory in the human brain for transplantation in patients with amnesia.

Not everything will go so smoothly. Of the first four patients treated with the "Gate of the Brain", one later decided to remove the computer connector because it interfered with other medical facilities, and Joe Ann Louis said her vision had not been restored to safety The point of the road. However, Amanda's broken arm was fitted with a more flexible new plastic cover, and the nerves and electrodes controlling the arm were better tuned.

"This means that I can do a lot more with a prosthetic arm," she said. "There is another new one out of Chicago that allows me to make a lot of different gripping movements, which I want to use. I hope to pick up coins, hammers, and toys with my children in the garden with a prosthetic hand. "Kuiken said, this is not a luxury. "We bring patients with assisted living tools better than they used before, but they are still too crude and can't compare with the delicate human body structure. They are as insignificant as the candles held in the sun in front of nature" .

(Smart prosthetics; Intelligent artificial limb).

Eric Schremp has been paralyzed since he broke his neck in a dive in 1992. He can move his fingers and hold a fork with an electronic device implanted under the skin. Joe Ann Louis is a blind woman who can see the outlines of trees with the help of a miniature camera that communicates with the optic nerve. There is also a year and a half of Aiden Kenny, who can listen to her mother and respond, because the boy who was born deaf has 22 electrodes in his ears that convert the sound collected by the microphone into a signal that the auditory nerve can read.

Smart Prosthetics China

On October 11, 2013, a smart powered prosthesis was unveiled at the China International Welfare Expo. This assistive device for the disabled, jointly developed by Beijing Disabled Persons' Federation and Peking University, has a motor chip inside. Compared with ordinary prosthetics, it can promote the disabled person to walk to make it more labor-saving, and it can turn freely to facilitate the disabled The stairs make the disabled walk more stable and natural. As there is no mass production, pricing has not yet been made. On the same day, the 2013 China International Welfare Expo was held at the National Exhibition. More than 270 companies from 16 countries and regions participated in the exhibition, and a total of more than 8,800 auxiliary appliances were displayed. The exhibition will continue until the 12th. ^[1]

The latest technology in smart prostheses

Details 1

Writing brush characters is about wrist force, multi-joint collaboration, and moderate intensity. It is not easy for ordinary people to learn to write brush characters, let alone robots. In the exhibition hall of Chongqing Institute of Green and Intelligent Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, a robot holding a brush dipped the brush into ink and wrote it. The movement is as flexible and flexible as a person. ".
"It's actually imitating what I wrote." Li Yao, director of the Center for Intelligent Neuromechanical Electronics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said that this is a full-degree-of-freedom intelligent dual-arm robot

A full-degree-of-freedom intelligent dual-arm robot is characterized by its tactile sensation and can learn human movements. As long as a person holds it by hand, he can write it in the same way.

This robot can write 3000 Chinese characters, and can shake hands, say hello, and hold a cup.

The full-degree-of-freedom intelligent dual-arm robot can also accurately sense the movements of the human body's nerves and muscles, and coordinate movements, so it can help children with cerebral palsy to undergo rehabilitation training. It can also become a smart prosthesis and help doctors perform surgery. They have cooperated with the Department of Orthopaedics, the Third Military Medical University Southwest Hospital, and will use this robot in surgery in the future.

Smart two-armed robot will write according to your actions

After getting up, you enter the program on the full-degree-of-freedom smart two-arm robot, leaving the child with the writing brush practice problems of the day, because he thinks it's cool to learn this way.

Fatigue Driving Detection System

On the way to work, because you didn't sleep well the night before, you were reminded frequently by the fatigue driving detection system while driving, so you quickly concentrate and concentrate on driving. ^[2]