Are We Close to Star Wars-like Prosthetics? From: Robotics Trends - 12/04/2015 Imperial College London discusses how prototype sensor technology may make robotic prosthetics more user-friendly for people in the future. Researchers from Imperial College London have developed a prototype sensor system that is inexpensive and easy to calibrate by detecting mechanical signals, instead of electrical signals, from tiny vibrations produced by muscle fibres as they move when muscles flex. These vibrations can be sensed and passed to a robot hand to make it move in response to the user’s muscles like their own hand. The technology also has a motion sensor system to detect arm movements. This enables a user to control how the robotic hand grasps different sized objects, through a simple sequence of muscle flexes and arm movements. Read the entire article and view a video (3:26) at: http://www.roboticstrends.com/article/are_we_close_to_star_wars_like_prosthetics Links: Alex Lewis http://www.alex-lewis.co.uk/who-we-are/about-alex Ravi Vaidyanathan http://www.imperial.ac.uk/people/r.vaidyanathan