First Bionic Leg to Harness Nerves Allows Mind Control Movement

"Someone watching him climb wouldn’t know he had a prosthesis based on his gait, Hargrove said, though they may hear the motor whirring."

That's incredible. We may not have flying cars, but this is quite a step in the right direction.

I have the same number of feet but one more knee than this guy. From what I understand about above-the-knee prosthetics, walking up stairs with a "normal" gait is an impressive feat. Clearly, the technology is near-miraculous.

With all this said, I'd much rather see advances in bionic attachment techniques. If I could have a metal rod extending from the distal end of my tibia through skin, being without a foot would be much less annoying, and my physical abilities would improve significantly. I could just clamp on a prosthetic in the form of a carbon fiber spring -- the same sort I have now. Presuming the rod required little maintenance, I would require far fewer trips to the prosthetist for construction of new sockets as the shape of my residual limb (the politically correct term for "stump") changes over time. No risk of skin issues preventing me from using my prosthetic leg. No risk of catching my prosthetic foot on something while walking and pulling it off my body. Current socket-based attachment techniques create what effectively is an extra joint with very limited range of motion. Oddly, this is useful for subtle manipulation of a gas pedal (I'm missing my right foot), but it is mechanically inefficient, reduces my perception of stability, and keeps me from feeling like the prosthetic foot is "mine". Because of this extra joint, heavy shoes feel really heavy. Lots of effort has gone into making prosthetic feet light -- a much less valuable attribute if direct body attachment was possible. Reducing the value of making prosthetics lightweight would allow for all sorts of innovation.

My understanding of the current state of affairs is that, while it's quite easy to stick a metal rod into the distal end of a bone, it's quite difficult to allow it to protrude through skin without risking infection. My general take when reading yet another article about some amazing $100K prosthetic device is similar to my thoughts when hearing fuel cell folks talking up the technology in the early 2000's -- They all showed up at tech events talking about how fuel cells were going to change the world, how their own novel technology was going to make them more efficient, lighter, whatever. My question to them was always, "When am I going to be able to replace my laptop battery with a fuel cell so I can take a cross-country flight without worrying about my battery running low?" They always gave some vague answer and then went on talking about the improvements they were making to a technology which was not at all available to me. It's 2013, and I haven't yet owned a fuel cell. However, I'm writing this on a Mac with much better battery life than was available a decade ago even though the fundamental technology used in its battery is unchanged.

See it in action:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkHoV6XJGsk

There was a pretty great book by Max Barry (Jennifer Government, Syrup, Company) called Machine Man[1] that was about this; the main character was an engineer who lost his leg, and decided to build a better one. The whole thing is worth reading for the first chapter alone.

[1]http://maxbarry.com/machineman/

I am very excited and hopeful about technologies like these. Computers, mechanics, neuroscience, software and all the other technologies are at such a stage that we can clearly notice their mind boggling advancement in a handful of years. We don't say "50 years ago this would have seemed like magic", but "5 years ago this would have seem like magic" and that time interval is shrinking.

It's only going to get harder and harder to predict the products that we will see in coming years since we don't know how all of these accelerating technologies will intersect in the future.

Now a nerve bridge could be used to jump the broken nerve space for quadraplegics, using this same principle. This is awesome!

I can hear the sounds in my head. If you watched 'The Six Million Dollar Man' or 'The Bionic Woman' in the 70's, you probably hear the same sounds.

Hayden Christiansen is one step closer to realizing his life's work.

When do we get real light sabres?