The BBC recently reported on developments in prosthetic hand technology which include the addition of sensory feedback via a direct nerve interface. The research was part of the SMARTHAND project and was led by a team at Lund University, Sweden. According to CORDIS:

What is unique about the sophisticated prototype artificial hand developed by the SMARTHAND partners is that not only does it replicate the movements of a real hand, but it also gives the user sensations of touch and feeling. The researchers said the hand has 4 electric motors and 40 sensors that are activated when pressed against an object. These sensors stimulate the arm’s nerves to activate a part in the brain that enables patients to feel the objects. [CORDIS News]

The research strategy attempting to deepen the feedback and control may involve the use of nanotechnology to further miniaturise components of the interface between the hand and arm:

The hurdle they need to cross is to make the cables and electric motors smaller. Nanotechnology could help the team iron out any problems. Specifically, they would implant a tiny processing unit, a power source and a trans-skin communication method into the user of the hand to optimise functionality. [CORDIS News]

The story ran with the emphasis on the inclusion of sensory feedback. It often seems as though people are much more accepting of the mechanical side of prosthetic technologies than the sensory side (despite the availablility of cochleal implants). It seems to be a violation of intuition that adding sensory capacity might be the easy part of the problem - give a brain a signal and some feedback and it’ll detect patterns and correlate them with events in the world. It’s the giving of the signal and feedback that presents the greatest difficulties. It will be fascinating to watch for changes in what counts as intuitive as the availability of technologically mediated raw experience increases.

Sources:

• New robotic hand ‘can feel’ [BBC News: 18 October 2009]
• Innovation makes artificial hand seem real [CORDIS News: 9 October 2009]

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MIT’s Technology Review reports on the development of a technique designed to prevent the damage caused by the metals in current neural interfaces, where ‘insertion of the rigid metal electrode into soft tissue triggers a cascade of inflammatory signals, damaging or killing neurons and triggering a scar to form around the metal’ [Technology Review].

“We hope to come up with a way to communicate across the scar layer and send information to and from the device in a way that is as friendly as possible,” says David Martin, a materials scientists at the University of Michigan, in Ann Arbor, who is leading the research into the polymer coatings.

Martin and his collaborators coat the electrodes with an electrically conductive polymer originally developed for electronic devices, such as organic LEDs and photovoltaics for solar cells. The polymer coating increases the surface area of the metal-biological interface, which in turn boosts performance of the electrode.

Along with former lab members, Martin founded a company, Massachusetts-based Biotectix, to commercialize the materials developed in his lab. He says that he is already in talks with a cochlear-implant technology company about using his lab’s materials in their devices. [Technology Review]

[Technology Review via Technovelgy]

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The BBC have reported that the director of rehabilitation engineering services at NHS Lothian, David Gow , has developed a new prosthetic hand. The design and construction of the artificial hand was undertaken by Touch Bionics, Livingston. The hand has fully articulated finger joints and motors for each digit, allowing it to adapt to the shape of objects. The hands are intended to be available on the National Health Service in two to five years.

The hand is controlled my myoelectric sensors attached to the skin above nearby muscle tissue. There are some useful introductions to myoelectric control at the Institute of Biomedical Engineering, New Brunswick, here.

A BBC news video is available here. The BBC news story is here.

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The Scotsman have reported on the development of miniaturised, ’speckled computing’ techniques being developed by team based in Edinburgh, Glasgow, St. Andrews and Strathclyde universities¹. Dr Damal Arvind, director of the team, will deliver a talk about these new computational systems at Edinburgh International Science Festival on Friday 13th April.

Arvind said: “This is the new class of computing: devices which can sense and process the data they receive. They also have a radio so they can network and there’s a battery in there as well, so they are entirely self-powered.

“You can do lots of interesting things with this technology. We are seeing this kind of technology in the Nintendo Wii and this is a very, very primitive form of what we will be demonstrating on Friday.” [The Scotsman]

On a related note, I am reminded of the 5 micron RFID chips produced by Hitachi² which are many times smaller than the 0.4mm x 0.4mm mu-chips that can already be found embedded in tickets etc.

¹[From The Scotsman via Medgadget and Engadget]

²[Fuji Sankei (in Japanese) Via Pink Tentacle]

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Scientists at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique have published a paper in Nature Neuroscience describing their success in erasing the memories of traumatic incidents in rats without damaging other associated memories. The research is intended to help develop therapeutic regimes for Post Traumatic Stress Disorders. Cordis reports that,

…researchers trained rats to be frightened of two distinct sounds by playing the sounds and then sending an electric shock to their paws. The next day, half the rats received a drug which is known to cause amnesia for events recalled from memory, and the researchers played one of the sounds again.

On the following day, the researchers again played both sounds to all the rats. They found that the animals who had not received the drug were still frightened by both sounds. However, the rats which had received the drug were no longer disturbed by the sound they had heard while drugged. By playing one note and prompting the recall of the electric shock memory while under the influence of the drug, the traumatic memory was erased. However, the memory of the shock associated with the other note remained intact. [Cordis]

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Wired reports that LifeCell are planning to open a publicly accessible bank of stem cells collected from umbilical cords in India. Since donors would be paid for their contributions there are fears that a “cord-farm” culture could emerge amongst the poor. Wired also reports that:

For the past two years, LifeCell has run a private cord-blood bank, which caters to 4,000 paying donors who can afford their own personal biological insurance policy. Its customers bank their own blood in case they need a stem-cell treatment one day and can’t find a viable donor. In a collaboration with Florida-based CryoCell, LifeCell has aggressively expanded to 19 locations throughout India. It plans to have 31 centers up and running by 2007.[Source]

Since people are already storing eggs and sperm in case of medical problems late in life the wealthy will soon need managers to administer their growing portfolio of externalised biotech self-maintenence strategies. At least two groups of philosophers should be paying attention of these developments:

1. Philosophers of mind working with the ‘extended cognition/mind’ thesis.
2. Systems theorists working with the theory of autopoeisis.

To what extent are these developments extensions of the self-maintenance systems that articulate agents? Are these instances of somatic self-maintenance tasks migrating from lower level systems into cognitive strategies?

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