Thursday, May 9, 2013

New Prosthetic Able to Feel.



The ever-adorable Baby Rhesus Macaque.
Currently, if one loses a hand, arm, leg, et cetera, they will receive a prosthetic. These prosthetics, while awesome monuments to our collective achievements, are woefully inadequate in performing as an actual hand. At the University of Chicago, researchers and engineers have managed to create a prosthetic hand which can perceive apparently the same way a regular hand would. To do this, they trained a group of monkeys to respond to touch. After they did this, they hooked up electrodes to the monkeys’ brains, and sent signals to the somatosensory cortex, in the area that receives messages for the hand. The Rhesus monkeys, when put into a condition such that they couldn’t see their hands, responded as they were trained. Thus, their method worked, which means that it can now be programmed into future prosthetics. The only delay to beginning testing on humans is that it must first pass the FDA’s inspection and testing. Optimistically speaking, testing will begin sometime in 2014.

Themes on the Nature of Science:
Science is tentative: while the method for inducing somatic response appears to work, it can’t be tested on humans until the FDA agrees that it is relatively safe.
Science is based on evidence: we know that the Rhesus monkeys have no reason to act as they were trained unless they felt pressure on their hands, so we know that they did feel something. However, the plan is that there will be very extensive human testing to hone the product before it is released on the open market.

-Sebastian Wolf

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