Neurobiologist Andrew Schwartz led the University of Pittsburgh research team that developed the prosthetic arm. He says researchers placed about 200 electrodes in the woman’s left cerebral cortex. The left cerebral cortex is the part of the brain that people use to move their right arm.
Dr. Schwartz says the electrodes recorded what the woman’s brain cells were doing when she thought about moving the arm.
“And that was enough information that we could then decode from those recordings, what the intention of the subject was, the way she wanted to move her arm and her wrist and close her hand. We could decode the information from those neurons to allow us to do that.”
Jan Scheuermann took part in a 13-week-long program to teach her brain to move the arm. But she did not need that much time. She was able to use her mind to move the robotic arm after just two weeks of training.
She reportedly told researchers that she planned to use the arm to feed herself some chocolate. When she was able to do that, it made the research team very happy.
Andrew Schwartz says his team plans to build another artificial arm, so people like Ms. Scheuermann can hold and move objects using two hands.
“And really the satisfying part is that we’re not just making a machine move, we’re actually recreating natural humanoid movements. So we’re capturing all the beauty and grace and skill of a real movement, and allowing these subjects to basically return to a certain amount of function that they used to have.”
最新
2013-11-25
2013-11-25
2013-11-25
2013-11-25
2013-11-25
2013-11-25