Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to Forward Thinking. Welcome everyone to Forward Thinking, the podcast that's Bigger, Faster, Stronger.
I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland, and I am joined by Lauren Vocalban and Joe McCormick, and we wanted to talk about transhumanism, but specifically about how prostheses have changed over the years and how they're going to change in the future, and h the interfaces that we will use between our brains and a robotic prosthetic for those of us who
need to be fitted with them. Um. And to really understand about the development of prosthetics, you just got to look back a few decades really to see how far we've come. Because Dean Cayman, who is a developer of many technologies, one of the most famous being the segue, but also of something called the Luke arm, which we'll talk about in a little bit, said, you know, you
just look at the development. If you looked at prosthetic legs, they had progressed quite a bit over the last several decades, but prosthetic arms had not. Essentially, if you had lost, say a hand, you would get it replaced with a hook, and maybe a few years later they developed it where you could have a hook that would have a clamp essentially on it that would be attached to other muscles, and when you would clinch those muscles, you could make
the clampch other. Yeah, you can pinch things, pick things up, but still very limited mobility, very limited utility, and that this this sort of state of affairs lasted way too long. Though it's surely not because the designers were lazy. Right, this is really hard to do. Yeah, no, it's it's incredibly tricky to design a limb that can replace something
as versatile as the as a human arm. When you think about, um, the human arm, and you think about how many degrees of freedom you need right to do something as complex as say playing a guitar, or even just like eating spaghetti, even just picking up a cup. But when you're not entirely sure how how hard the cup is. That's that's not a thing that you find
out until you touch it. And you've got this incredibly complex feedback system, right, yeah, how heavy it might be, so you have to be you know, we take it for granted, those of us who have all our limbs, We take it for granted, because that's our daily experience, right. So it's only when something has happened where uh, we need to have a limb replaced, or maybe we were born without a limb, that this really becomes a consideration that you know, we think about for any length of time.
Otherwise it's just this is just life. I just just reach over and pick up a cup, yeah, which of course happens all the time. And going way back into history with with War, I mean especially in history because we had less good medical technology, and less good was pretty much a mark of history as far as the medical technology went vocal bound. But I say worst things on a nearly minute by minute basis. You're good. It's
a good word. Um, but you know, and then you've got you've got all kinds of of science fiction things like like a Star Wars where where you know, Luke loses a hand and I've only made word my way up to episode two OMG spoilers, or even even an Army of Darkness where you know, Ash goes back in time and somehow can cos this mechanical hand of the gauntlet. It's groovy. I will say it's groovy. For the longest time,
we were looking at pretty limited prosthetic arms. Uh. And really that's where a lot of the focus on the technology has been recently. Although we've seen other type of of robotic aids, uh, not just for arms, but things like cochlear implants things like that. But but arms are really what we were focusing on today. Well, it seems that what's the difficulty. Hear right, We can create robotic
arms these days that are incredibly precise. And I'm not talking about the kind of arms you put on a person, right, You're talking about our stationary arm that might work on manufacturing. Yeah, go look at a you know, like an auto production facility and look at the amazing arms they can build. The problem doesn't seem to be anymore the design of the arm itself, but the interface between the arm and
the human brain that controls it. To be fair, there's also I'm sorry, Lauren, go ahead, Oh no, no no, no, no, I was just gonna say, you know, we still know more about robotic mechanics than we really do about human brain mechanics because the way that neurons work is kind of mysterious. Right, And and on top of that, just to go back to another challenge that auto assembly arm
probably weighs several hundred pounds. So so, well we did one thing, well we can well we did one job, right, you had one thing to do today, but it did it right six thousand times right. But but again, you're talking about something that was made for industrial use. You're talking about something that is meant to replace a lost human limb. Obviously, things you have to worry about, not
just our usability, but how heavy is it? It needs to be like cost, the cause, well the cost also, but really, I mean putting costs aside for now, how heavy is it? You've got to make it light enough so that a human being can can use this comfortably or else it's not useful, right, It's not not something that's going to increase someone's quality of life, which is really what we're talking about here. So it needs to
be light. It needs to be efficient because if you have to constantly uh plug it in because the batteries are draining, then that would be a quality of life issue as well. It needs to be versatile. It needs to be able to give you some sort of sensory feedback because if you have a robotic arm that has a ability to grip but no feedback. You wouldn't know
how hard to grip something before picking up. You could shatter glass just squishing cups of coffee at the right You wouldn't want to do that, obviously, if you were unable to determine how tightly you were squeezing them without I mean hearing them squeal in pain obviously. So so these are challenges. I mean, they're real challenges. It seems kind of easy to make light of it, but when you think of it from an engineering standpoint, these are real challenges to overcome, and uh, to kind of talk
about where we've been. Recently, Dean came in again, the guy who invented the segue. He took on a project that he ended up calling the Luke Arm, and he named it after the character from the Star Wars series, Luke Skywalker who the Star Wars series. Yes, it's a series, a series of three, wouldn't it wouldn't it be nice if they made some Star Wars prequels. I bet those would be swell. I love making that joke every time
we bring this up. But yes, Star Wars, of course, Luke Skywalker has his arm lopped off by his daddy Darth Vaders spoiler alert and Empire states his hand but go on, it's it is just his hand. But he ends up having more than just the hand replaced because you can see it in the wrist right because anyway, so he has his hand replaced with a robotic So Dean came in name his robotic arm after that character,
Luke Skywalker and uh. And what happened was he was actually approached by the United States government and they were telling him, listen, we have a lot of servicemen and women coming back from overseas who have suffered injuries in the line of duty. And while we can do a lot for anyone who's lost a leg, because the technology has really improved quite a bit so that people can get around with some you know, limited mobility, but better
off than they were. Uh, that technology hasn't really advanced to arms, so if someone's lost an arm, we don't have really anything sophisticated to help replace it. And so they gave him a challenge and they said, we need you to develop a technology that will allow a person who has lost all or part of an arm to have essentially the same mobility they would have if they still had their arm. The it can't weigh more than a normal quote unquote an average relations a normal and
average human arm. Uh, and it needs to have some sort of sensory feedback so know how tightly to grip something when you're picking it up and uh. And at first Dean came in said, Wow, I don't know that this is possible, because you're talking about developing something that's that's really light advanced in light. Those are the two things, right. And needed to have a lot of technology in it.
And it needed to have and needed to be made out of the material and enough with enough power but still be light so that someone would not feel like
it's a burden to wear it. And so they developed this Luke arms system and the early ones had an interface that was completely I mean, it was electronic, but it was similar to like a mechanical system in the sense that you would have buttons that you would operate, but with your feet you would wear uh, you know, your shoes would have the controls in them, and by putting pressure on your toes or the balls of your feet or the heels, you could make the arm do
different things like rise. There's a great video that shows Uh, an amputee who has lost nearly all of one arm and all of the other arm, and uh, and he's wearing a Luke arm that gives him the ability. I think it's his left arm that he's he's got now with the Luke arm, where he can do things like if he leans forward, the arm bends at the elbow, so he can bend his bring his hand closer to his face. And if he leans back, then it extends
the elbow. And then by operating a switch with by by leaning his neck just a little bit, he could change it so he could rotate the wrist by doing those same commands. So through a series of subtle and these are so it's not like it's not like he has to lean way forward to have this happen, but a few subtle muscular movements, he can operate this robotic arm. So that's one form of interface. Now granted, in this case, you really have to train yourself how to operate this
robotic arm using all these different emotions. It's almost like in a way playing a video game, manipulating a digital care through physical controls, same sort of thing. You're not You're not sending commands directly from the brain to the robotic arm you're doing. You're saying, all right, well, here's what I need to do. I need to lift my arm up, So I have to put pressure on my toes so that I can give the command to lift
up the arm. It has to become second nature. Yeah, And any prosthesis is going to involve people learning those kind of commands. They're they're making these retinal prostheses these days that have an array of electrodes and in place of the cells that would normally detect light for you, and and they're they're hooked up to a kind of kind of like Google glasses, sort of like a little video camera and glasses that you can wear, and um,
the glasses tell you when you're seeing something. They send a signal back to the electrodes, the electrodes and a signal to your brain. But it's not like you're seeing it. You have to learn how to interpret the messages like you might. You might see blocks that are representing an object in your in your field of view, and the greater the resolution that the more blocks you will see and the closer those blocks will resemble whatever the shape is.
So in general, with these right now, the state of the art as I understand it is that it lets you see that there's a shape in front of you, but it doesn't really give you a lot of definition yet. But it's incredibly promising. But we're always trying to get closer, aren't we? And there there are some people who have gotten amazingly close, as it seems to me. And by close, I'm talking about the connection between the brain and the movement of the press theses, uh, in a way that
feels natural. Now, when you go to move your your arm, assuming you haven't a regular human arm that's still attached to you just like most people have, UM, you don't have to think about a series of commands to do it. It's intuitive, right. You just think move and it moves. You think pinch and it pinches. Could we get there? Well, that's something I think a lot of people who design press theses have been thinking about for a long It's
a great goal, right. And so I saw a really interesting TED talk by UM, a guy who designs press the season. His name was I think I'm pronouncing this right as Todd Kaikin, and he was talking about a process called targeted muscle reinnervation. And if I understand correctly. The way this works is they can essentially simulate that direct connection between the brain and the movement of the
Pross thesis and uh, it works like this. So you've got a mechanical arm that has you know, a certain number of degrees of freedom and actions that can do like say, you know, move the forearm up and down by bending at the elbow, or pinch by moving the you know, the muscles in the arm, in the hand, um and in us. All of these things are controlled by nerve impulses through you know, nerves that go down
the arm. Now, they can't connect those nerves directly to a machine yet they don't know how to do it. We just haven't figured that out. The way to get the nerves of to send the signal directly to a machine to make it do the job essentially to build a new pathway for the ones that were lost or maybe we're never there, right, But they can reroute it mechanically.
And what he showed is that they would perform a surgery where they would take these nerves out of the arm and they'd reroute them to a muscle that's not used, much like they would near the top of the pectoral muscle, and each of these nerves would lead to a small patch of muscle up in the upper pectoral. And so when the person sends that that thought that the command
that that we used. You know, when you have an uninjured arm or a regular arm um to pinch, that sends a muscle command and it would make the muscle in this case the upper pectoral where the nerve has been routed, contract. Now they can teach the machine, based on sensors attack match to that muscle to learn how to do those commands. So essentially, by creating a mechanical detour for the signal to follow, you can create direct brain to pros thesis communication. So the person with this
arm really thinks pinch, and the arm pinches. So almost instead of teaching the person how to rethink the process, they're teaching the machine how to rethink the process, how el the machine how to interpret those those muscle contractions. That essentially, when this part of the muscle contracts, that means rotate the wrist, that kind of thing, Because that's
what that's the actual command that's coming from the brain. Uh, it's really fascinating and and that's that's a it's a huge it's a huge leap ahead, and it's an amazing development and it's very promising. Uh. And I imagine that the next step would have be the direct brain interface, where we don't even have that um that that little
mechanical stop over, stop over sure. Right now, there's a problem with real estate, right You've you've only got so much muscle on your body that you can use to amplify these nerve signals, and by doing that, you're taking up muscles that really should be used for other things. Right yeah, Yeah, there are only a few muscles that we would not think of as being really necessary for uh day to day life. You know, things that things that you you have, but you're not using them all
the time for some other purpose. Uh. Clearly if it were something else that you were using all the time, then that would interfere. Like when you were trying to actually accomplish one task, it would have a second task going on with your robotic limb because it was being it was misinterpreting the commands. Um yeah, because again, the machine itself doesn't know anything, It doesn't know one command
from another. It just when it detects that there's this this activity going on that's a command for it to do something. The machine is not itself, is not intelligent, it's just reacting in a very specific way to very specific uh input. So yeah, I think the next step is the whole brain computer interface, which is going to go well beyond just prosthetics or prostheses, I should say, Joe corrected me before the show pet Yeah, yeah, it's
what do you call it? What do you think earlier to what do you call it when you have to set your clocks back an hour? Anyway, Yeah, it's exciting to see this development and uh and very encouraging and and I highly recommend if you have not gone online and watched that Ted talk or watched some of the videos about Dean Cayman's lucarm I recommend watching them. They're
very inspiring. And it's to see the people who this is affecting, that the people who have are are suddenly regaining abilities that they might have lost more than a decade or two decades ago. And to hear them talk about that experien variants is really a phenomenal thing. And and a lot of the people who are working on this, on this medical technology, they credit the fact that you know, you're actually seeing lives change because of what you do,
and that's why they're doing it. It's not because there's some sort of lucrative contract involved. It's all about when you see someone's life change in that that huge away, and that they are suddenly much more self reliant because of it. That's phenomenal. You know, it's a great story and those are very inspiring videos. I highly recommend checking
them out. So I have a question for you. Sure, imagining that this trend is going to continue like most technological trends do, Um, how far away do you think we are from a time when you can create a prosthetic arm that's virtually indistinguishable from the arm you're born with. Well, right now, we can already create limbs that give some form of force feedback, although usually that's to let us.
Usually that ends up being something like a little vibrating motor, and the more it vibrates, the harder you are gripping something. So right now, that's you know, kind of an artificial way of determining how hard you're gripping it. I would say that this is so much fun because whenever you're talking about future technologies, it's always safe to go with we're twenty years away, because we're always twenty years away. It depends on the technology. Either you're always twenty years
away or you're always a decade out away away. I feel yeah, but but seriously, I mean, we're the complex nature of creating a brain computer interface that is seamless is you can't It's impossible for me to overstate how complicated that is because we we honestly, we don't understand everything about the brain. So until we have a true understanding of the brain, it's very difficult to create an
interface that's going to work, especially yeah, especially across a population. Right, you have to build them almost from the ground up on an individual basis, because we don't have enough of an understanding to approach it from a more general standpoint. So final answer, twenty years, Laura, I'm gonna I will while we're making up numbers, I'm gonna say fifty fifty years. Definitely. Lauren's a pessimist, Joe, I have no idea. Why do you ask a question because you just wanted to know
because you'll are smarter than me. Okay, well that's fair. I do not think that's true. Don't come in so yeah, No, I'm kidding Joe. Joe's a very bright guy. Uh, almost human level intelligence. So but anyway, no, no, this this is a really interesting topic and it's one of those where I think when you see the benefits of the technology, it's I can't imagine not being inspired by it. I find it, you know, in an incredible story. So I'm
really eager to see this continue in the future. Uh. And meanwhile, we want to know what you guys think about the future, what's your what excites you about the future, And we want this to really be a conversation sation, So go to f w thinking dot com be part of our group. You can follow us on Facebook, on Twitter, on Google Plus. We're at all those locations. Were eager to have this conversation where you find out what makes you excited about the future. Let us know and we
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