Here & Now’s Scott Tong speaks with Gideon Gil of STAT about a new technique for amputation surgery developed by researchers from MIT and Brigham and Women’s Hospital that recreates muscle connections and restore the brain’s ability to sense where and how one’s limbs are moving.
MIT researchers are using magnets to help improve control of prosthetic limbs, reports Emmett Smith for Mashable. “The researchers inserted magnetic beads into muscle tissue to track the specific movements of each muscle,” reports Smith. “That information is then transferred to the bionic limb, giving the users direct control over it.”
Dezeen reporter Rima Sabina Aouf writes that MIT researchers have created an inflatable prosthetic hand that can be produced for a fraction of the cost of similar prosthetics. “The innovation could one day help some of the 5 million people in the world who have had an upper-limb amputation but can't afford expensive prostheses.”
Engineers at MIT have developed a soft, inflatable, neuroprosthetic hand that allows users to carry out a variety of tasks with ease, reports Emmett Smith for Mashable. “People who tested out the hand were able to carry out quite complex tasks, such as zipping up a suitcase and pouring a carton of juice.”
UPI reporter Brian P. Dunleavy writes that MIT researchers have developed a new system, modeled on a dog’s keen sense of smell, that could be used to help detect disease using smell. “We see the dogs and their training research as teaching our machine learning [sense of smell] and artificial intelligence algorithms how to operate,” says research scientist Andreas Mershin.
Mashable spotlights how MIT researchers have developed a new type of amputation surgery that could “help amputees better control their residual muscles and sense where their ‘phantom limb’ is in space.”
Postdoc Shriya Srinivasan has devised a new way to perform amputation surgery that would reconnect dangling nerves to the skin and help restore a patient’s sense of touch, reports Anissa Gardizy for The Boston Globe. “I would hope that in the next 10 years, people are offered the ability to have these advanced techniques incorporated into their initial surgery,” she said.
WBZ-TV’s Anna Meiler spotlights undergraduate Riley Quinn, who is running the Boston Marathon to raise funds for an organization that provides custom prosthetic devices for amputees. “Knowing I’m raising money for a cause that matters so much to me and will impact the lives of others,” says Quinn, “it’s that extra push where it makes me try a little harder.”
CBS Boston reporter Dr. Mallika Marshall spotlights research by researchers at MIT and Brigham and Women’s Hospital to develop robotic prosthetic limbs controlled by the brain. “It’s a wonderful experience as a researcher,” explains Herr of the work’s impact. “They walk away and start crying or laughing and giggling and say, ‘my gosh I have my body back, I have leg back, I have my life back.’”
In an article for Forbes, Charles Towers-Clark spotlights how MIT researchers developed a surgical technique that allows amputees to receive feedback from prosthetic limbs. The technique, Towers-Clark writes, “uses a muscle graft from another part of the body to complete the muscle pair, avoiding rejection which currently occurs in around 20% of cases, and allowing the patient to communicate naturally with the new limb.”
MIT researchers have developed a surgical technique that could make prosthetic limbs feel more natural, writes Karen Weintraub for Scientific American. “With this approach, we’re very confident that the human will actually feel position, will actually feel speed, will actually feel force,” says Prof. Hugh Herr. “It’ll completely feel like their own limb.”
Guardian reporter Nicola Davis spotlights Prof. Hugh Herr’s development of an autonomous exoskeleton device that could reduce the amount of energy humans use to walk. “We are taking a first principle approach, and joint by joint understanding deeply what has to be done scientifically and technologically to augment a human,” Herr explains.
Writing for Wired, Juan Enriquez highlights the MIT Center for Extreme Bionics, which was launched in an effort to develop technologies that augment human performance and could help eliminate disabilities. Enriquez writes that the center’s “long-term ambitions are breathtaking.”
CNN’s Jessica Ravitz describes how MIT researchers are working with surgeons from Brigham and Women’s Faulkner Hospital to outfit a patient with a prosthetic limb that can be controlled by the brain. The patient will have “wireless sensors implanted in his muscles, which will integrate with the robotic prosthetic being created for him.”
MIT researchers are developing a bionic prosthesis that can be controlled by the wearer’s brain waves, reports Marie Szaniszlo for The Boston Herald. Graduate student Tyler Clites explains that the limb’s “versatility goes far beyond the technology that is currently available.”