Good Idea, Chap: The Bionic Arm- a Future That Feels the Past

I might have not mentioned it before but I am of the opinion that working towards a healthy and fit body is the only way to achieve a healthy mind.

Thus, I have been going to the gym three times a week for quite some time now.

In fact, I went there yesterday; and that was where I got the idea for today’s article.

I was meant to do chest and triceps yesterday and was just about to do a set of dumbbell bench- press, using 26kg dumbbells.

Just as I was preparing myself to do so, I saw a person walking into the gym.

He was missing a leg and an arm; that much I could tell by seeing the prosthetics that he had on.

The man was in his late fifties, early sixties and, most probably, an army veteran who had lost his limbs in battle (he had a ‘Navy’ bag with him).

My eyes could not stop following him around; not because I was interested by his prosthetics or, indeed, by the way he walked or behaved.

It was out of sheer admiration and, admittedly, curiousity as to what he was going to do.

In somewhat of a daze, I soon realised that the man was in my vicinity and was doing 

something with the curl bar.

He was lifting it up.

Knee- height.

With 25kg worth of weights on it.

Using one arm.

I was stupefied; I was using the curl bar to do 30kg biceps curls using BOTH of my hands and I STILL found it quite difficult!

And then it hit me; if that person was so strong and determined with the use of only one arm and one leg, could you imagine what he would be like if he was to get his other limbs back?

Straight after my work out, I went online and I found that, through the marvels of bionics, this was now possible.

This was, of course, only the beginning but, to me, it still looked astonishing.

I shan’t go into any details or pretend that I am an expert on bionics; I shall, however, do my utmost best to explain how the bionic arm demonstrated above works.

When an arm is amputated, the nerves connecting the arm to the brain retain their ‘movement memory’; i.e. they remember impulses that they had sent the brain in order to move the muscles of that arm.

What scientists have done is connect that nerves that have been severed to the muscles of the chest so that, in time, the ‘movement memory’ can be transferred onto the chest.

Amazing and movie- like as the above might sound, within six months (as seen on the video above), the patients were able to give commands to their bionic arm by contracting their chest muscles.

Contracting the chest muscles, to which the amputated arm’s nerves possessing the ‘movement memory’ have been attached to, sends electronic signals through the nerves and onto the bionic arm, thereby, giving it instructions to move in a certain way.

What’s even more amazing is that the nerves connected to the chest muscles had also retained a ‘memory of feel’ which could also, potentially, be transferred onto a bionic arm so that the patient could feel whatever he was touching.

You won’t be surprised, I hope, to find out that the above has since been successfully implemented and there are now bionic arms which allow the patient to be able to feel and distinguish the surfaces or objects that he touches.

See << http://www.fijitimes.com/story.aspx?id=225646 >>

I am fully aware that the above is not as exhaustive as you would like it to be.

Nevertheless, I thought that I’d share my little bit of newly acquired knowledge with you mainly because it made me proud to call myself human.

Maybe, just maybe, being human is not that bad.