Bionic Medicine
Today’s use of technology is transforming both the practice and the delivery of medicine. Specifically, we see that Bionic Medicine is making groundbreaking discoveries with the help of researchers and the mechanics that they are using. Bionic Medicine is used to create a better quality of life for people who have suffered from tragic limb or organ loss. Through studies and trials, the advancement in bionics are making leaps and bounds from when they first were produced as wooden prosthetics to now, where they are able to operate through electrical impulses. The usage of bionics are extremely beneficial to it’s patients and will further advance in the near future. Expectations for the future of bionics are held high, and it can be predicted that amputees will be able to operate with using only their mind. Even further in the future, researchers hope to dispense with the robotic arms and direct the decoded brain signals straight to the patient’s own muscles.
Bionic Arm
The "bionic arm" technology is possible primarily because of two facts of amputation. First, the motor cortex in the brain (the area that controls voluntary muscle movements) is still sending out control signals even if certain voluntary muscles are no longer available for control; and second, when doctors amputate a limb, they don't remove all of the nerves that once carried signals to that limb. So if a person's arm is gone, there are working nerve stubs that end in the shoulder and simply have nowhere to send their information. If those nerve endings can be redirected to a working muscle group, then when a person thinks "grab handle with hand," and the brain sends out the corresponding signals to the nerves that should communicate with the hand, those signals end up at the working muscle group instead of at the dead end of the shoulder.
Rerouting those nerves is not a simple task. Dr. Todd Kuiken of the RIC developed the procedure, which he calls "targeted muscle reinnervation." Surgeons basically dissect the shoulder to access the nerve endings that control the movements of arm joints like the elbow, wrist and hand. Then, without damaging the nerves, they redirect the endings to a working muscle group. In the case of the RIC's "bionic arm," surgeons attach the nerve endings to a set of chest muscles. It takes several months for the nerves to grow into those muscles and become fully integrated. The end result is a redirection of control signals: The motor cortex sends out signals for the arm and hand through nerve passageways as it always did; but instead of those signals ending up at the shoulder, they end up at the chest.
To use those signals to control the bionic arm, the RIC setup places electrodes on the surface of the chest muscles. Each electrode controls one of the six motors that move the prosthetic arm's joints. When a person thinks "open hand," the brain sends the "open hand" signal to the appropriate nerve, now located in the chest. When the nerve ending receives the signal, the chest muscle it's connected to contracts. When the "open hand" chest muscle contracts, the electrode on that muscle detects the activation and tells the motor controlling the bionic hand to open. And since each nerve ending is integrated into a different piece of chest muscle, a person wearing the bionic arm can move all six motors simultaneously, resulting in a pretty natural range of motions for the prosthesis.
