An Italian team has achieved a prosthetics breakthrough. Led by neurologist Paolo Maria Rossini, a team at Rome’s Campus Bio-Medico has created a robotic hand that allows the wearer to control it with thoughts and actually feel sensations through the device.

It’s the first time an amputee has been able to make truly complex movements using a robotic prosthetic. Dubbed the LifeHand, the project is just the beginning as another E.U. initiative called the SmartHand hopes to replace an entire human arm.

Reminds you of that Luke Skywalker scene where he flexes his robotic hand for the first time huh? It won’t be long until robot parts are extending our lifespans significantly.

[Dvice]

Filmmaker Rob Spence has made some interesting progress on his new “eye-to-eye” documentary. He has an LED attached to his prosthetic eye, making him look very Terminator-like.

It’s the first time his team has managed to fit an electronic device, with a power source into the eye. His right eye was damaged in a childhood accident, so he’s been using a prosthetic for years. His goal is to create a prosthetic eye with a wireless video camera to film his experiences.

[Gizmodo]

An experiment, conducted by neuroscientists at the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University, involving a pair of macaque monkeys with electrodes implanted in their brains, have the monkeys operating a robot arm like it was their own. They are even able to feed themselves much of the time, which is pretty impressive.

Research has been going on since 2000 and a similar break through occurred in 2003, but now they were able to make a monkey walk on a treadmill at Duke University and control the motions of another robot in Japan. This could lead to a breakthrough in prosthetics, where the user might train himself to close a prosthetic hand by shrugging his shoulder, and the brain will adapt, with the shrug motion eventually becoming second nature.

Or monkeys and robots might team up and give us a Terminator/Planet Of The Apes future.

Great for prosthetics, but it could also apply to normal people controlling machines with their minds in the future, whether your car or computer.

[Popular Mechanics]

This tiny puppy, named Hope, was born without front legs. So what do you do in that situation? You start rebuilding him like the Six Million Dollar Man of course. Orthotist David Turnbill created some custom legs for Hope using simple model airplane wheels, and each of the “legs” can move up and down independently, allowing the dog to pivot and turn. Adorable? Hell yes. A sign of things to come? Yep. In the future, we’ll have animals that look more like cars, that will transform into other monstrosities.

Remember the paws that we repair today could kill us tomorrow. Check out the video below.
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