A helping hand

• Autores: Sam Wong
• Localización: New scientist, ISSN 0262-4079, Nº. 3050, 2015, págs. 20-21
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • The gurgling murmurs one can hear, made by muscle fibres as they move against each other, could provide a way for people to control prosthetic hands more easily. PhD student Sam Wilson and his supervisor Ravi Vaidyanathan are designing new ways for the human body to control prostheses. Typically, these use electrodes on the surface of the skin to pick up electrical activity in the arm muscles, called myoelectricity. Vaidyanathan had the idea to develop different sensors for controlling prostheses when a colleague told him about a man who split his time between India and the UK, and claimed that his prosthetic hand knew when it was in India and stopped working. His doctors were baffled. Eventually they realized that the warmer Indian climate was the culprit: sweat was interfering with the electrodes that sense his muscle movements. It's a common problem with such prostheses: they don't work consistently for long periods