Physical Address
304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124
It was Alex Smith He was 11 years old when he lost his right arm in 2003 when a drunk driver crashed his family’s boat overboard in Lake Austin and his arm was severed in the water.
A year later he got a myoelectric arma type of prosthesis that works with electrical signals from the muscles in his residual limb. But Smith hardly used it because it was “very, very slow” and had a limited range of motion. He could open and close his arm, but he tried other robotic arms over the years, but they had similar problems.
“They’re just not super-functional,” he says. “There’s a big delay between doing the function and then actually doing the prosthesis. It’s just faster to find other ways to do things in my day-to-day life.”
Recently, he’s been testing a new system by Austin-based startup Phantom Neuro that has the potential to provide more realistic control. limb prosthesis. The company is building a thin, flexible muscle implant that will allow amputees to have a wider, more natural range of motion by simply thinking about the gestures they want to make.
“Few people use robotic limbs, and that’s mostly because of how terrible the control system is,” said Connor Glass, CEO and co-founder of Phantom Neuro.
According to data shared exclusively with WIRED, 10 participants in a study conducted by Phantom used the company’s wearable version of the sensors to control an already-marketed robotic arm, achieving an average accuracy of 93.8 percent across 11 hand and wrist gestures.Smith was one of the participants , and the other nine were able-bodied volunteers, which is common in early prosthetics studies.The success of this study paves the way for Phantom in the future for testing implantable sensors.
Current myoelectric prostheses, like the ones Smith tried, read electrical impulses from surface electrodes that sit on the amputee’s trunk. Most robotic prostheses have two electrodes, or recording channels. When the person flexes the arm, the muscles still contract occur in the upper limb amputee when they flex.The electrodes pick up electrical signals from these contractions, interpret them, and initiate movements in the prosthesis.However, surface electrodes do not always receive stable signals because they can slip and move, reducing their accuracy in the real world.
