We use our hands for touching, grabbing, holding, feeling, manipulating, and caressing. Whether we acknowledge it or not, our hands are constantly making precise movements to allow for things like writing, art, or even things that give us pleasure like sports. Our hands are also capable of heavy labor, things such as lifting heavy objects, digging, or even to hold things. We even use our hands while talking to help further express our selves (Smith 2006). Over 25,000 people each year in the US face hand amputations. All of these things that we use our hands for, these people are no longer able to complete, and it leaves life for them frustrating, and depressing. Giving these people the chance to experience these actions, especially touch again, would be
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These successful innovations could open the world of science and medicine to so many new things including the possibility of this technology in all prosthetics.
The first step to creating this functional hand has been taken by the Advanced Platform Technology Center (APTC), which is located at the Virginia Medical center. They have been working on sensors that would go on the prosthetic hand. The sensors would route the signals to the brain via nerves in the arm to stimulate the parietal lobe which is in charge of touch. This idea offers a logical and promising solution to adding the sense of touch to the prosthetic. The center turned to Tekscan Inc. for a design known as force sensor resistors. FSRs are classified in the thin-film category (Mraz 2014). It is important that the sensors used are small enough to fit on the prosthetic to make it most efficient in size. This is a huge step to a functional prosthetic, and the ideas and designs of Tekscan give this idea the biggest chance of taking off. A problem that engineers face is space, because the hand includes lots of wires, and lots of sensors. The idea behind the FSR sensors is
These successful innovations could open the world of science and medicine to so many new things including the possibility of this technology in all prosthetics.
The first step to creating this functional hand has been taken by the Advanced Platform Technology Center (APTC), which is located at the Virginia Medical center. They have been working on sensors that would go on the prosthetic hand. The sensors would route the signals to the brain via nerves in the arm to stimulate the parietal lobe which is in charge of touch. This idea offers a logical and promising solution to adding the sense of touch to the prosthetic. The center turned to Tekscan Inc. for a design known as force sensor resistors. FSRs are classified in the thin-film category (Mraz 2014). It is important that the sensors used are small enough to fit on the prosthetic to make it most efficient in size. This is a huge step to a functional prosthetic, and the ideas and designs of Tekscan give this idea the biggest chance of taking off. A problem that engineers face is space, because the hand includes lots of wires, and lots of sensors. The idea behind the FSR sensors is