| iLimb Wins Engineering Prize |
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| Written by A Smith | ||||||||
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Whew, just spilled beer on my keyboard, then decided to take it all apart and clean each individual key, and clean out the under carriage. But I did find out that the inner workings are protected from such mishaps. I wonder how many generations of keyboards it took to figure out a system to prevent a splash of beverage from wrecking the whole thing. And I also wonder how long it took before people got comfortable enough around the new fangled electronic thing to bring any liquid in to the same room.
Now I can get to what I was trying to write about just before I knocked that shitty corona over.
The new commercially available iLimb wins the UK's MacRobert Engineering award. I saw this story from the BBC Nature and Science section (where I typically find things that interest me). It has to do with myoelectric prosthetics. These are prosthetics that have a small motor (or in the case of this new iLimb, several motors) that are activated by sensors placed topically on the residual limb. This part, I'm not quite sure on, but the sensors either pick up electric pulses from the muscles, or they just sense movement, like contractions of the muscles in your forearm. Then a computer chip reads the pulses and has the motors do their thing. So, again from what I've gathered, one would contract different sets of muscles in the forearm to make the prosthetic do certain functions.
The problem with myoelectric prostheses, is that there is a lag time between when you contract the muscles and when the hand functions. Albeit parts of a second, I would imagine it would be frustrating having to wait for your hand to move. I read an article about a veteran that lost both of his hands and got set up with a cable, harness and hook system and used that for a while. Then he given a set of myoelectric hands. He ended up going back to the cable and hook system because of the lag time.
So I would like to know what kind of lag time the iLimb has compared to other current myoelectric devices. I think that the big advances should be to minimize the lag time instead of making an particularly dexterous device. Seems like a system with zero lag time and with minimal dexterity is better off than something that has individual motors for each finger but may have a lot more to compute because of it.
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