INTRODUCTION Can you imagine how difficult the lives could be after the amputees lost their arms or legs? Their lives will not be as easy as they had before. They cannot do many things that they used to do in their normal lives when they still have their limbs. A few hundred years ago, a hand amputee could only have a hook prosthesis with limited function and social stigma for the replacement of his hand. As the technology advances, hand amputees can now have the option for a hand transplant with bionic hands. Not only for the hand amputees, but also those with arms and legs amputated are able to have bionic prosthesis transplantation nowadays. The first hand transplant was performed in 1999, and the development of bionic prosthetic limbs
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Older bionic arm designs were not attached to patients’ body. They could only be mounted on a chair or desktop due to their heavy weights. Controlling by a variety of control inputs such as voice input and computer input, makes them inefficient and not acceptable to most of the users. The modern bionic limbs are designed closely to have the nature form of the human limbs and to restore the functions of the limbs. Improvements in biomaterials have made the current bionic limbs lighter and able to be transplanted or wore on a harness by the patients. The current bionic limbs can now restore the patient’s ability to interact with the environment and participate in occupation. Additionally, it also reduces the costs for having assistive care or paying visits to a hospital or a clinic. Lastly, it enhances the confidence of patients in performing their activities and respective occupation (Allin et al., 2010; Clement et al., …show more content…
(2009), the enhancement for the function of prosthetic arms was studied by giving TMR surgery, the surgical technique they developed, to five patients with shoulder disarticulation or transhumeral amputations and tested the performance of the participants (5 TMR patients and 5 control non-amputees) in completing various arm movements. For each movement, participants were asked to follow the visual prompts, and a virtual arm that responded to the classifier output was displayed on the screen. After the desired movement was performed, the participants were asked to maintain it until the virtual arm completed the movement. Each of the 10 motions was randomly presented three times in a trial and the trials were repeated six times for a total of 72 hand-grasp motions and 108 elbow and wrist motions. These data were used to evaluate the speed and consistency of control using real-time pattern
Older bionic arm designs were not attached to patients’ body. They could only be mounted on a chair or desktop due to their heavy weights. Controlling by a variety of control inputs such as voice input and computer input, makes them inefficient and not acceptable to most of the users. The modern bionic limbs are designed closely to have the nature form of the human limbs and to restore the functions of the limbs. Improvements in biomaterials have made the current bionic limbs lighter and able to be transplanted or wore on a harness by the patients. The current bionic limbs can now restore the patient’s ability to interact with the environment and participate in occupation. Additionally, it also reduces the costs for having assistive care or paying visits to a hospital or a clinic. Lastly, it enhances the confidence of patients in performing their activities and respective occupation (Allin et al., 2010; Clement et al., …show more content…
(2009), the enhancement for the function of prosthetic arms was studied by giving TMR surgery, the surgical technique they developed, to five patients with shoulder disarticulation or transhumeral amputations and tested the performance of the participants (5 TMR patients and 5 control non-amputees) in completing various arm movements. For each movement, participants were asked to follow the visual prompts, and a virtual arm that responded to the classifier output was displayed on the screen. After the desired movement was performed, the participants were asked to maintain it until the virtual arm completed the movement. Each of the 10 motions was randomly presented three times in a trial and the trials were repeated six times for a total of 72 hand-grasp motions and 108 elbow and wrist motions. These data were used to evaluate the speed and consistency of control using real-time pattern