Ever since Zac Vawter climbed 103 floors in Chicago’s Willis Tower wearing a bionic leg, research into computerized limbs has spread. Because amputated legs are the most common missing limb, and because legs are so crucial to your movement and balance, most research and development has focused on bionic legs.
The team working on Mr. Vawter’s leg was a collaboration of specialists from several universities, who spent years developing and fine-tuning the device to respond to the wearer’s impulses around movement.
Now a similar athletic event will premiere in Switzerland this October.
The Cybathlon, starring a host of bionic devices, will give contestants the opportunity to compete with one another in a variety of exercises. Many of these exercises are simple tasks that the able-bodied take for granted: using a knife to spread jam on bread, walking across a room, riding a bicycle. Whereas the Paralympics accommodates those with a compromised ability to move, but who can still compete athletically, the Cybathlon in Zurich calls the contestants “pilots” who control the machines. The machines are what make locomotion at all possible.
They’ve been under development for years, and fine-tuning the relationship between neural signaling and muscle movement is a complex and difficult task. There are design challenges at both ends-mimicking neural signaling and information processing, and creating a machine that is light enough, durable enough, and helpful enough to use regularly.
The bionic legs available now weigh about 10 pounds.
How does it all work? Well, patents guard a lot of the specifics of how each device is designed. To control a machine’s movement the way you would control your arm requires rewiring motor nerves to connect with electrical sensors embedded in a robotic limb. Developed by a physician at the Rehabilitation Institute in Chicago, the procedure attaches nerves from amputated limbs to working muscle tissue, then integrates those nerves with electrical sensors. Thus by thinking “use hand to open drawer”, someone with a bionic limb is able to do just that. This is what the Cybathlon hopes to showcase-people who were told they would not be able to walk again will walk with bionic legs and perform activities of daily living that would otherwise not be possible for them.
Don’t start worrying about a cyborg invasion just yet, though. Part of the reason for the event is to gain visibility and hopefully more funding for future research and development. Rehabilitation robotics are still very expensive and inaccessible to most people. Many improvements can still be made. Step by bionic step.
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