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A new paper on the Open Source Leg, an artificially-intelligent bionic prosthetic leg developed by University of Michigan researchers, was recently published in Nature Biomedical Engineering.
The open-source project, launched publicly last year, is meant to ease the research of controls for prostheses by offering an accessible, comparable, and universal platform available to a broad array of scientists and engineers.
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By tuning into a subset of brain waves, University of Michigan researchers have dramatically reduced the power requirements of neural interfaces while improving their accuracy. This discovery could lead to long-lasting brain implants that can both treat neurological diseases and enable mind-controlled prosthetics and machines.
The team, led by Cynthia Chestek, associate professor of biomedical engineering and core faculty at the Robotics Institute, estimated a 90% drop in power consumption of neural interfaces by utilizing their approach.
Continue reading ⇒A new robotic prosthetic leg prototype offers a more natural gait while also being quieter and more energy efficient than other designs.
The key is the use of new small and powerful motors, originally designed for a robotic arm on the International Space Station. The streamlined design offers a free-swinging knee and regenerative braking, which charges the battery with energy captured when the foot hits the ground. This feature enables the leg to more than double a typical prosthetic user’s walking needs with one charge per day.
Continue reading ⇒In a major advance in mind-controlled prosthetics for amputees, University of Michigan researchers have tapped faint, latent signals from arm nerves and amplified them to enable real-time, intuitive, finger-level control of a robotic hand.
To achieve this, the researchers developed a way to tame temperamental nerve endings, separate thick nerve bundles into smaller fibers that enable more precise control, and amplify the signals coming through those nerves. The approach involves tiny muscle grafts and machine learning algorithms borrowed from the brain-machine interface field.
Continue reading ⇒A new open-source, artificially intelligent prosthetic leg designed by researchers at the University of Michigan and Shirley Ryan AbilityLab is now available to the scientific community.
The leg’s free-to-copy design and programming are intended to improve the quality of life of patients and accelerate scientific advances by offering a unified platform to fragmented research efforts across the field of bionics.
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