Episode 332 - Affordable, smart and helpful prosthetics

Getting a prosthetic limb to feel natural and comfortable without spending a fortune is incredibly difficult. Plus the human body (and prosthetics) change over time. So how can you make a prosthetic better match it's user? We look at three stories of adaptive prosthetics and finding ways to make use of new technology to help improve lives. From building an elaborate treadmill contraption to hearing through your fingers.   When you stumble your brain goes into overdrive to keep you standing, but what exactly does it do?    Affordable and comfortably fitting prosthetic limbs are especially important for children who grow out of them quickly. How can we make them more responsive?   Hearing words clearly in a noisy environment is especially hard on those with hearing aids. But can your fingers help out?   Vanderbilt University researchers built an elaborate treadmill to trip people, with the goal of helping advance prosthetic research.    Using 3D scanning, printing and embedded sensors, researchers are making prosthetic better matched to their users.   People often say look with your eyes not your fingers, but can you use your fingers to hear as well?   Embedding sensors into 3D printed prosthetics can help adapt the design to better suit the actual wear and tear from the body.    Using an elaborate tripping contraption on a treadmill, Vanderbilt university researchers hope to stop prosthetic leg users falling over.    Yuxin Tong, Ezgi Kucukdeger, Justin Halper, Ellen Cesewski, Elena Karakozoff, Alexander P. Haring, David McIlvain, Manjot Singh, Nikita Khandelwal, Alex Meholic, Sahil Laheri, Akshay Sharma, Blake N. Johnson. Low-cost sensor-integrated 3D-printed personalized prosthetic hands for children with amniotic band syndrome: A case study in sensing pressure distribution on an anatomical human-machine interface (AHMI) using 3D-printed conformal electrode arrays. PLOS ONE, 2019; 14 (3): e0214120 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0214120 Shane T. King, Maura E. Eveld, Andrés Martínez, Karl E. Zelik, Michael Goldfarb. A novel system for introducing precisely-controlled, unanticipated gait perturbations for the study of stumble recovery. Journal of NeuroEngineering and Rehabilitation, 2019; 16 (1) DOI: 10.1186/s12984-019-0527-7 Katarzyna Cieśla, Tomasz Wolak, Artur Lorens, Benedetta Heimler, Henryk Skarżyński, Amir Amedi. Immediate improvement of speech-in-noise perception through multisensory stimulation via an auditory to tactile sensory substitution. Restorative Neurology and Neuroscience, 2019; 37 (2): 155 DOI: 10.3233/RNN-190898