Your Thoughts Control This Robotic Prosthetic Arm video [CNET]

Atom Touch is a noninvasive prosthetic arm with individual finger control. It’s controlled by muscle activity and thought.

This is Adam touch. It’s a prosthetic arm that you use your mind and muscles to control. Let me show you how it works. This artificial arm is completely noninvasive and it’s the world’s first prosthetic to have individual finger control. So first you can control every joint, elbow, wrist, fingers, open and close the hand. You can get touch feedback on the fingers. You can lock the grip so you can maintain grip on something. You can auto level with the hand so that it won’t spill your wine or your coffee, whatever it might be in terms of actual activities you can do with it. You could shake someone’s hand, you could pack your kids’ lunch, you could open your car door or just get in your car. Normally with other prosthetics, you generally have to get individual parts like an elbow, wrist and hand from different manufacturers. Then a prosthetist puts them together. The atom touch is a whole arm with a battery and all the compute power in the forearm. A user puts on a special shirt, then a cuff over their residual limb electrodes inside measure muscle activity via emg or electromyography. So you can control the arm’s movement. Basically the way that you feel is there are haptics, the socket. So the user puts on a socket, they attach the arm to that and inside that socket, when each of the fingers make contact with anything, they get a little buzz. It’s kind of like uh on your iphone or your apple. Watch how you get a little buzz. Sometimes. This is Jason Morris. He lost his arm in a work accident 12 years ago. He’s one of dozens of users helping test Adam touch during development and shows us what it’s like to put on and wear the arm coming over the arm, just loosen up the cuff on the inside and I could go straight down into the arm and then these are just two bow straps. I just tighten up around the EMG cuffs. The last thing I need to do is just attach the velcro to the shirt itself. It is four pounds, but it feels like maybe a pound and a half, two pounds that I’m actually having to lift. How does it kind of compare in terms of the ease of use of putting it on compared to the other prosthetics that you do have? It? It’s a lot different from anything in the past, pulling my arm into a air tight socket using a, what’s it called? A P sock. It’s pretty strenuous and sometimes you don’t get it right the first time. But, um, this, I’ve realized is just once I get it on, it’s, it’s nice and secure every time and it’s fast, goes through a short five minute training session to register his muscle activity. The first time he puts the arm on, we ask them using your phantom limb that you can see. But we can’t rotate your wrist in, rotate it out, flex your thumb, extend your thumb. It might sound a little strange to hear that, but they can do that. Even though there’s been an amputation, the nerves are still sending the signals to their brain. So less than five minutes flex everything. And now the system has a snapshot of what you’re trying to do. So when I go to pick up a block, for instance, I am thinking about each position before I get into it. So I have to look at first where my elbow joint is or what position I want that into. And then I’ll rotate my wrist before I reach over to grab the block. And then once I level and get that all accurate, then I can go ahead and squeeze my hand or just think of a hand closed gesture until I pick it up. I can move the wrist up and down. So it makes it really important for when I’m going in to grab a glass of water. I don’t have to contort my whole body to level up the hand. I could do it just by simply thinking about it, I’m feeling my actual fingers do the work and it translates into this motion and it really, it, it’s a satisfaction that you just, you can’t explain. It’s something I’ve lost for, you know, 12 years and now I’m finally getting it back. What’s the one real big thing that you want? Adam? T to be able to do that it can’t do at the moment. The most meaningful thing is as much control as we can restore, right? It’s muscle control, motor control and it’s sensory feedback. What can you really not do? Probably right now that we wouldn’t recommend, you know, writing cursive, playing a piano, that’s really fine motor control to do that stuff. At some point, these neural interfaces have to get a lot better. So that might mean going into the body, it might mean more electrodes. But regardless the more control we can restore and the more sensation we can restore. That’s the most meaningful thing. I really appreciate the questions. But I think probably the thing I want to know the most is like, do you wanna try it? Do you wanna try out the arm well done? All right, let’s do it. So what I’m doing here is essentially programming this virtual arm. It’s kind of like programming an action on say your phone, you can assign whatever action or gestures you want and it can correlate to a number of different movements in the virtual arm and then the actual atom touch itself down here is the actual readings of my muscle activity. So when I’m not doing anything, it’s pretty static. But when I make an action, like I programmed a thumbs up motion to flex my virtual arm and then I’m gonna flex my hand backwards to get my arm to extend downwards. Again, I have done another training of the actual arm and I can do a couple of different actions like extending and then bending back. And you can see on the screen behind me, all of the actions that I’ve actually trained it for are mapped right there. It’s actually really wild having to consciously think about making an action, especially an action that doesn’t necessarily correlate with, you know, extending my elbow. I’ve mapped it to actually moving my hand like this. It takes a lot of concentration and a lot of muscle memory. But this is truly mind blowing. What are you anticipating the finished version to be made out of? And are you 3D printing it? Are you machining it? How is that gonna be made? Yes. All the above. Yeah. Yeah. So there’s some level of additive manufacturing or 3D printing in some parts. So you see here the socket, this is 3D printed. The arm itself is machined to all the parts inside the actuators and the motors, whether or not it’s 3D printed or mean you the point is that it has to be light because you’re gonna be wearing this thing all day. And if I put a five pound weight on your shoulder and you had to carry it all day, it’s gonna add up. Right. It’s like doing a crossfit class all day, every day. So diffusing the weight across someone’s body with this shirt so that it feels almost like nothing at all, which is what we hear from our users means that the materials need to do a few things really well, breathe, wick sweat away. Don’t break down for a long time and be replaced easily because this again should be more of a consumer product. The final version will look a little different from version number two that you’re seeing here and will be one size fits most. Adam limbs wants to make this as affordable as possible about the same or a little less than a body powered prosthetic hook which currently costs around $25,000. They’ll go through clinical trials and FDA authorization and anticipate availability after that in 12 to 18 months. Thanks so much for watching this episode of beta test. You can find out more about Adam Liz and Adam touch in the description linked below. I will see you next time with my artificial arm. See ya.