Thought-Controlled Prosthetics (FOLLOW-UP) Edit
Neuro-Bionic Limbs

New advances in prosthetics technology allow amputees to control movements of their “bionic” limbs with nothing more than thought. Physicians and engineers at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago are working on optimizing the prototypes. The researchers hope they technology will ultimately work as well as, if not better than, the human analogue.

The thought-controlled appendages were already being used by four people last September, including the first woman with a bionic arm. The technology “works by detecting the movements of a chest muscle that has been rewired to the stumps of nerves that once went to her now-missing limb,” the Washington Post reported at the time. “Someday she hopes to upgrade to a prosthesis, still under development, that will allow her also to ‘feel’ with an artificial hand.”

A little over a year later…

“In the United States and Canada, government interest in developing better prosthetic limbs has grown as a result of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan,” the Canadian Press reports.

“Improvements in body armour and in battlefield medical practices have helped lower the number of casualties from those conflicts, but the side effect has been a significant increase in the number of amputees.”

Though no major new breakthroughs have happened in the last year, scientists are avidly researching new technologies.