The Project
Our exhibit is about prosthetic hands. Have you watched Star Wars episode 5, “The Empire Strikes Back”? No? Go and watch it now, I’ll wait.
OK, I’m assuming you’ve watched it now, so here’s a mild spoiler: one of the main characters gets his hand cut off by an evil relative. As a budding pianist (more on that in the next post), I was shocked. How would I play the piano if that happened to me?!
Luckily, our hero gets a brand new prosthetic hand which looks and behaves exactly like a human hand (at least in the original films — he’s let himself go a bit recently).
In reality, modern prosthetic hands look human, but do not behave like human hands: their movements are quite limited and robotic. The goal of our research is to improve prosthetic hands by enabling natural, life-like control. To do this we study how the brain controls intact hands, and recreate it by connecting muscles to prosthetic hands via computers.
There are many aspects to this, which I’ll go into in future posts. For example, do you know how many nerves and muscles control the human hand? You only grasp (ha) the complexity of hand control when you try to recreate it.
