Claudia Mitchell, from Ellicott City, US, is the first woman to carry a
thought controlled bionic arm and the fourth person to receive it. Mitchell lost her left arm in a motorcycle accident. Now, if she wants to peel a banana, all she has to do is place her prosthetic left arm next to the banana and think about grabbing it. The mechanical hand closes around the fruit and she's ready to peel.
The bionic arm is capable of doing 4 of the 22 discrete movements of a normal arm, but researchers are working to improve this number.
Her device was designed by physicians and engineers at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago, it works by detecting impulses in a chest muscle that has been rewired from the stumps of nerves that once went to her now-missing limb.
The Institute is part of a multi-lab effort, funded with $54 million from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), to create more useful and natural artificial limbs for amputees. It is dedicated to helping people with all levels and types of physical disabilities regain or improve their physical functions and empowering them to participate more fully in family, social, vocational and leisure time pursuits.
Pentagon pushes to create a lifelike prosthetic arm and hand - a mission made even more urgent as more soldiers come back from Iraq and Afghanistan without limbs. As of July, 411 members of the military serving in Iraq, and 37 in Afghanistan, have suffered wounds requiring amputation of at least one limb.
The first person to benefit from a "bionic-arm" was Jesse Sullivan, a Tennessee power company worker who lost both of his arms above the shoulder in a work related accident in 2001. Dr. Todd Kuiken at RIC developed a procedure to graft Mr. Sullivan's amputated nerve endings from his shoulder onto the pectoral muscle. As those nerves grew to innervate the chest muscles, the electrodes located over the graft began to pick up electrical signals reflecting the impulses and transmitting those to the mechanical prosthesis.
Mitchell benefits from the new second generation of thought-powered "bionic-arm," the most advanced prosthetic in the world today, requiring its wearer only to think about what he wants his arm to do and his prosthesis will do the job. Soon, she will benefit from the third generation prosthesis, still under development, that will allow her to also "feel" with an artificial hand. She is ready for it now
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