Neural Work-Around Makes for More Practical Bionic Limbs From: Scientific American - Advances - 12/2013 - page 14 By: Gary Stix The secret to building brain-controlled prostheses may be to ignore the brain entirely In the past several years scientists have delivered a slew of advances in wiring prosthetic limbs directly to the brain. A number of studies have reported that severely disabled patients—or monkeys employed as research surrogates—have used bionic limbs controlled by thought to, say, pick up a cup or hold up a hand and give a high five. Many of these devices have yet to become more than sophisticated laboratory showpieces that require constant fine-tuning to preserve a clear connection to the brain. Reliably reading the signals from electrodes implanted in the brain constitutes one of the grand challenges of neuroscience and biomedical engineering - and will occupy generations of researchers to come. In the meantime, scientists and engineers have found a way to bridge the missing link. Instead of trying to decipher the cacophony of signals inside the brain, some researchers are configuring prostheses to take commands from the nerve endings left behind after an amputation. Read the entire article at: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=neural-workaround-make-for-more-practical-bionic-limbs Links: Robotic Leg Control with EMG Decoding in an Amputee with Nerve Transfers http://www.nejm.org/doi/pdf/10.1056/NEJMoa1300126 Zac Vawter, Seattle Man, Fitted With The World's First Thought-Controlled 'Bionic' Leg (with video 2:28) http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/26/zac-vawter-seattle-bionic-leg_n_3997616.html