Artificial Nerve Could Allow Prosthetic Limbs
Researchers have created an artificial nerve that triggers a muscle response in cockroaches. In humans, it might let patients with artificial limbs touch and feel sensation and pressure or someday, maybe even pressure-feeling robots.
Scientists used the artificial nerves to successfully detect the motion of a small rod moving in different directions, and to identify Braille characters. When they connected an artificial neuron to a neuron in a cockroach with a leg removed, signals from the artificial neuron made the living cockroach contract and twitch.
Here's how it works: our sense of touch involves thousands of sensors that track different types of pressure. The senses have to be strong enough to pass a gatekeeper before they're communicated to the brain. The artificial sensory nerve replicates the process through three parts: first, a series of sensors pick up on various pressure hues, and create an increase in voltage between electrodes. A second device translates the voltage into electrical pulses, and a third device sends out electrical pulses in patterns that mimic biological neurons.
The organic nerves are made out of soft, flexible organic materials and are surprisingly cheap to manufacture, which means scientists could eventually add in many artificial nerves to help pick up different types of sensory information. This could help those with artificial limbs to regain a sense of touch, and give robots a new way to interact with their environments, which could help robots take on more tender roles, like taking care of humans with a gentle touch.
(via Science)
You Might Also Like
