31 year-old Zac Vawter made history on Sunday when he became the first person to scale the 103 flights of stairs in Chicago’s Willis Tower with a mind-controlled robotic leg, reports the Associated Press . The artificial limb takes advantage of targeted muscle reinnervation (TMR), a technique that connects nerves severed in an amputation to other, viable muscles. In Vawter’s case, the nerves that would ordinarily control his missing lower leg have been rerouted to his hamstring, whose electrical impulses are converted into control signals that move his prosthesis.
The first of these kinds of "bionic" limbs, called myoelectric prostheses, was introduced in 2005 by a team lead by the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago (RIC) Center for...
via The Verge - All Posts http://www.theverge.com/2012/11/5/3602254/zac-fawter-bionic-leg-chicago-willis-tower
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