Nicole Kelly was born without her lower right arm, but using a cutting-edge prosthesis she got last year, she can now grind pepper, play cards, and open beers — just by thinking about the action.
Kelly’s is just one tale from a riveting new Wired story about the steady improvements in prostheses that take orders directly from users’ nerves. The big step forward: software that can make sense of the complex signals from a specific patient’s nervous system.
These systems pick up nerve signals via electrodes positioned on a user’s upper arm. The user then trains an algorithm to translate their body’s signals into natural motions
Kelly’s prosthesis, which uses hardware and software made by Coapt, even has a “reset” button that lets her reboot the algorithm if it’s acting up and retrain it, a process that she says takes her just two minutes after about a year of practice
One problem is that the tech is still very expensive. Coapt’s system costs between $10,000 and $15,000.
