Smart Prosthetics Exploring Assistive Devices for the Body and Mind: Task Group Summaries (2007) / Chapter Skim
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Conference Summary
Conference Summary
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From November 9 to 11, 2006, more than 150 researchers in fields ranging from biomedical and material engineering to surgery, neurology, and military medicine converged upon the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Center in Irvine, California. The fourth annual conference of the National Academies Keck Futures Initiative (NAKFI)
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Warren Grill, associate professor of biomedical engineering, neurobiology, and surgery at Duke University, walked conference participants through the basics of neural stimulation, which feeds information into the nervous system, and neural recording, which interrogates the nervous system to determine the internal state and could also provide command signals to a prosthetic device. In discussing how to improve orthotics to help people walk, Bradford Bennett, research director of the Motion Analysis and Motor Performance Laboratory and assistant professor of research at the University of Virginia, promoted patient-specific models that record and adapt to a person's individual gait.
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With the deadline fast approaching, groups contemplated plans to restore sensory perception of limb movement, design a prosthesis to grow with a child, replace damaged brain tissue, and design a functional tissue prosthesis. Others tackled problems like electrode longevity, the best way for electrodes to interface with the brain, and how hybrid prostheses might exploit electrical processes within nerve cells.
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One group, asked to design a functional tissue prosthesis, diagrammed a renewable internal power supply for a prosthetic device. The hybrid-technology "battery pack" aimed to harness cellular energy by aligning electrocytes, coaxed to behave in a certain way, on an implantable, biocompatible platform.
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6 SMART PROSTHETICS INTELLIGENT DESIGN In the keynote address Michael Merzenich of the Keck Center for Integrative Neurosciences said, "We can make smarter prostheses when we're smarter in integrating state-of-the-art neuroscience with state-of-the-art engineering, medical, and social science." As was acknowledged during the conference, researchers cannot underestimate the capacity of the human brain -- to restore function, to be trained, to make up for what's been lost in extraordinary ways. If with the help of prosthetic devices sensory information can continue to flow into the brain from the peripheral nervous system, research shows that the brain will learn to use that information for motor control.
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