New Bionic Leg Can Learn and Predict How You Move
One of the biggest challenges for people with prosthetics is transitioning between walking on flat ground and climbing a set of stairs. But a new high-tech bionic leg could make walking upstairs far more natural for prosthetic wearers, Motherboard reports.
Developed at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago, with study results published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, this powered artificial limb is straight-up bionic. The new prosthetic, which is still in testing, is designed to recognize patterns in the way a person walks by using built-in sensors, as well as external electromyographic signals (EMG).
The prosthetic then uses those patterns to basically anticipate when a wearer is going to start walking up a set of stairs or ramp, and adjusts itself accordingly.
This is some seriously impressive stuff.
Even today’s most advanced powered prosthetics require the wearer to press a button or move a specific way for the artificial limb to enter a kind of stair climbing mode.
This new prosthetic, though, will automatically calculate for changes in the way a person is walking so wearers will be able to simply maneuver up a set of stairs without having to worry about any special button presses or manual actions.
Surprisingly, the artificial limb will have an impressive 12 hours of battery life. The leg, though, is still in its early testing phases and won’t be available to the public for quite some time. Still, it already looks incredibly promising.
The rise of powered prosthetics has already seen incredible technological advances in recent years.
In December 2014, John Hopkins’ Applied Physics Laboratory revealed that a patient was able to control a pair of powered bionic arms using his thoughts.
And though the arms are slow to move, and require patients to move them one section at a time (first elbow, then wrist, etc.) it returns a sense of normalcy to their lives.
Proof? At the time, the wearer of the prosthetic, Leslie Baugh, said he was looking forward to doing simple things –– like putting change in a soda machine on his own.
via: Motherboard
