The major advance behind these prosthetic arms is a surgical procedure called Targeted Muscle Reinnervation (TMR) that reassigns the nerves that once controlled the patient’s arm and hand to the patient’s pectoral muscles.  Hand and arm signals from the patients brain can then travel into the pectoral muscle and be fed into a computer, which converts the signals into inputs for the prosthetic arm.  This transfer of brain intentions into signals that can control a robotic device is known as Brain Computer Interfacing, or BCI.

Creating the ultimate prosthetic arm is a daunting challenge, requiring an interdisciplinary collaboration across many fields to achieve success.  The BCI advances used in this prosthetic arm would be useless without accompanying advances in robotic arm agility and function present in the project’s DEKA robotic arm.  We reported on the DEKA arm last year.

See the prosthetic arm in action in the video below.  Remember, this arm is being completely controlled by the patient’s thoughts.  Note the electrodes on the pectoral muscle where the brain’s signals have been surgically re-routed for capture:

“The findings suggest that brain-controlled prosthetics, while not practical, are at least technically within reach.

In previous studies, researchers showed that humans who had been paralyzed for years could learn to control a cursor on a computer screen with their brain waves and that nonhuman primates could use their thoughts to move a mechanical arm, a robotic hand or a robot on a treadmill.

The new experiment goes a step further. In it, the monkeys’ brains seem to have adopted the mechanical appendage as their own, refining its movement as it interacted with real objects in real time. The monkeys had their own arms gently restrained while they learned to use the added one.”

Check out this awesome video of a monkey operating a robotic arm:

Robo-monkey uses brain power to feed itself