The biggest challenge for amputees is managing their prosthetics.
Most prosthetic limbs are made using electromyography, a way of recording the electrical activity of muscles, but it cannot give a person full control over the prosthesis.
MIT researchers have developed an alternative approach that, they note, allows you to control your prosthesis much more precisely.
The authors propose to introduce small magneticballs into the muscle tissue of the amputated limb, so, according to the authors' idea, it is possible to measure the length of the muscle as it contracts: these data are transmitted to the bionic prosthesis within milliseconds.
The new method is based on a strategy calledmagnetomicrometry, in Russian it literally translates as magnetomicrometry. The new technology tracks pairs of magnetic balls embedded in muscles using a mobile sensor array that captures the characteristics of each muscle.
Muscle signals are measured using electrodes,which are attached, for example, to the skin or implanted directly into the muscle: in the second case, the quality of the data increases significantly, but the cost of the operation is also high.
When we use muscle data withelectromyography (EMG), then we receive a kind of intermediate signal, we see what the muscle wants to do, but in fact cannot. Based on this information, the prostheses will move.
Cameron Taylor, lead author of the study
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