Amputee scales 103 floors with mind-controlled 'bionic leg' | Hacker News Reader

Amputee scales 103 floors with mind-controlled 'bionic leg'

edition.cnn.com

56 pointstokenadult11 comments

Video showing the leg in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5foYR--3EiA

To clarify, this bionic leg is not directly mind controlled[1]. Instead, the leg uses EMG electrodes on the tigh that record muscle activation signals, i.e. motoneuron discharges in the tigh muscles[2]; these neurons are presumably activated by spinal cord networks responsible for locomotion. These are activated by brainstem networks (a part of the brain we share with the most primitive vertebrates), which of course at some level are controlled by the cerebral cortex. Just to say that there are quite a few layers between conscious thoughts and the electrodes.

Still very impressive! And I think this is much more promising technology than direct brain recordings actually.

[1] Like e.g. José Millán's wheelchair where signals are extracted directly from the brain: http://www.technologyreview.com/news/420756/wheelchair-makes...

[2] http://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/health-fitness/zac-vawter-w...

The first question I asked while viewing the title was: in what time? Cause the fact of climbing 103 floors is almost useless without a second part telling us "in xxx hours".

The article says in 53 minutes! That was amazing speed! Two floors a minute!!

So let's say I lose a limb at some point in the future. How does one go about applying for these "research" positions? It seems like it would be an interesting hack to get into a mind-controlled robot limb experimental program instead of the traditional prosthetic limb.

Am i the only one who was expecting to see him on the outside of the building climbing up its face?

I was definitely hoping for that. I mean really, which is more useful.

Given the current political climate, there's no way I can make a comment like this without it sounding political, but here it goes...

It seems a shame to me that technology like this is not available to all amputees. I can only imagine the frustration I'd feel if I lost an arm or a leg and couldn't afford this, and had to settle for a "dumb" prosthesis instead. And I can only imagine this problem getting worse in the future, because this type of thing will never be able to reach the economies of scale to make it available to "ordinary" people on their own.

In my own country, to my knowledge, this isn't yet an issue, but as technology progresses and with budgets getting tighter it wouldn't surprise me if it becomes one in future.

Bionic prosthetic limbs like this is very hard to control, that's why it's newsworthy that a man can climb 103 stairs like this. To be able to use something like this requires lots of training and calibration, so it's not easy to mass produce them (yet).

And all that training and calibration requires highly-specialised workers to be able to help you. So it's more than just the cost of the device itself. Even if you could mass-produce them, I imagine they'd still need a lot of tailoring to the individual.

I actually saw someone using a motorised prosthesis for the first time recently, and it was very impressive to watch. I'm optimistic for the future, I just hope everyone who needs such technology can get access to it.

Exactly. I've done some lab work on reading muscle activity signals trough the skin, and the signals from the test subjects were very individual.

The mass produced prostethic limbs with control systems are mostly mechanical and slow, e.g. the users are using the remaning stump of their limb to push buttons on the inside of the casing.

To use neural networks or some other kind of machine learning to map the muscle signals to the wanted movement for the prosthesis would be a really interesting problem to work on.

What was a fiction in i-robot (Will smiths arm) is becoming a reality.Gr8..

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