E-Opra is the latest prosthetic hand, making you feel what you are holding

latest Prosthetic hand It reacts to your intentions, creating emotional impressions and directly fixing the wearer’s bones. of e-OPRA It may not be a bone, but it’s clearly approaching. and it is Amputee.

Developed by Swedish company Integrum, the e-OPRA reportedly combines several major advances in prosthetic technology to produce a replacement hand that the company claims is more comfortable, more accurate and easier to control. It is being done. Old style prosthesis.

The E-OPRA connects to the wearer via a special screw that is fixed inside the bone. The electrodes connect the wearer’s brain directly to a small computer in an artificial nerve that translates nerve impulses into commands. Think of it as a “pinch” and the robot’s fingers will pinch. Hand sensors record contact with an object and feed it back to the wearer’s brain. Feel Real.

Integrum has tested new prosthetic hands with four amputees since 2013. One of the subjects was a man in his late 40s, who the researchers identified by their own name, Magnus.

Magnus lost his right arm on his elbow in the early 2000s. He volunteered to try the Integrum prosthesis in 2014, initially wearing a rough version of the company’s robotic hand with an unsophisticated neural interface. The prosthesis sent and received signals via stick-on electrodes instead of being wired directly to Magnus’ brain.

As a result, it was less accurate than the later model. Still, Magnus was able to resume his old career as a truck driver, once his ability to grab and feel small objects was restored.

According to a research team led by Max Ortiz Catalan, a bioengineer at the Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden, e-OPRA with direct hand-to-brain shows even greater improvements for Magnus and other subjects. Integrum consultant.

“All patients reported increasing trust in the prosthesis since their intervention, calling it part of themselves, and reporting positive effects on self-esteem, self-image and social relationships,” Ortiz said. The Catalan team writes. on paper Appeared in New England Medical Journal On thursday.

“With Magnus, the new robot arm has been able to cope with every situation we face in the physically demanding task of driving a trailer between Sweden, Norway and Finland.” Integrum Insisted On that website.

E-OPRA advances many of the major aspects of prosthetic technology. Prostheses that have been connected to the wearer through sockets and straps for many years. In the 1990s, a new “bone-integrated” instrument-essentially a screw made of a material that encourages the growth of bone around-makes many amputees replace sockets into awkward fittings. I was able to.

A few years later, in the early 2000s, scientists developed a lightweight robot limb that could sense objects and push them back to the wearer. This is a rough copy of the push and pull of a real limb.

Next came the electrode base Neural interface. Thanks to the same advances that enable researchers Control the drone with your own thoughts, The next-generation prosthesis received commands from the wearer’s own brain and fed back the senses via patch-shaped electrodes that sense the electrical activity of nerves.

According to Integrum, E-OPRA combines and improves all these individual efforts. The fixture is even more compatible with bone, according to Integrum. The company claims the sensor is more sensitive. It supports a surgically implanted electrode that connects directly to nerve endings and digs into an external electrode.

The new prosthesis is “an intimate connection between the body and the machine. Between biology and mechatronics,” writes the Ortis Catalan team.

As a bonus, Integrum claims that e-OPRA does not require any special training. Just stick and grab.

Of course, prosthetic technology has a lot of room for improvement. For all advances in recent years, osteointegration is still comparable to screwing metal into bone. The fixture sticks out of the wearer’s skin like an intentional scar. “Long-term success may be compromised by implant-related infections,” 2017 survey.

Also, the interface between the brain and the prosthesis still has a lot of room for improvement. Scientists are still trying to decipher which nerve impulses correspond to which fine muscle movements. As a result, the hands of robots cannot match the hands of real humans, researchers pointed out March paper. “The number of independence movements is still limited.”

But “restricted” movement is better than no movement. Decades ago, amputations could end someone’s career or otherwise permanently affect their quality of life. It is possible to imagine a not-so-distant future where losing limbs is only a temporary setback.