In a First, a Prosthetic Limb Can Sense Temperature Like a Living Hand
In a First, a Prosthetic Limb Can Sense Temperature Like a Living Hand
The advance may help users feel a greater sense of human connection through touch
The device provides a realistic sense of hot and cold in the missing “phantom” hand by delivering thermal information to nerve areas on the amputee’s residual limb that the brain believes are still connected to the missing hand.
Nooo! The whole point of having a cybernetic arm/hand is that you can just stick your hand in a great big beaker full of liquid nitrogen-cooled eyeballs and not have to worry about getting frostbite!
You can also just grab the hot pan from the oven and not have to worry about getting burned.
You want temperature sensing? Put a thermistor in one of the fingers and a little OLED display on the arm (or even better: in a HUD that can only been seen in the user's eye). A nice, high temp one 👍
Lol, I get your point, but for right now the more we can make these feel like normal limbs to the people who need them, the better.
No need to further press down the gas on the potential dystopia. Welcome to your job at the smeltery, please enter surgery room 4 for your mandatory limb replacement with company owned propriatary hardware that is set for our needs to turn you into a disposable meat puppet and blind you of senses of danger, because accounting found that was cheaper than proper safety or using actual robots.
Pretty sure I saw this in a 60's comic book, lol.
As dystopian as that is, I imagine it's a whole lot cheaper and more stable to just make a robot and drop a brain into it.... Wait, wait, I mean build a robot and develop some kind of interface that enables humans to control them quickly and accurately.
Ah, hell, maybe that comic was right after all.
Thermistor and OLED? I mean you could. But I had a spoon from a box of Lucky Charms in the 90s that tells me there's a cheaper way.
It's not a first. I saw this in local trials in 1994. Physically, in person, not online.
Where?
Sabolich Prosthetics in Oklahoma. It was actually pretty simple; a higher frequency signal felt "hot" and a lower frequency signal felt "cold".
Had to ponder this, as at the time I was asked to stay quiet about it. But I never signed anything,it's unlikely the person I spoke to is even there any more, and it's been a long time.