The sighted hand
Engineers presented a prosthetic arm that "sees" the shape of objects
British engineers are preparing to test prosthetic hands that automatically determine the shape of the object to be taken and "adjust" to it.
A group led by Ghazal Gazei from Newcastle University "trained" a neural network to recognize the shape, size and position of more than 500 different household objects and choose the appropriate capture from four options. The bionic hand, created by scientists, is equipped with a camera that photographs an object, after which the built-in computer corrects the movements of the fingers and the hand needed to take it in milliseconds.
"Prosthetic limbs have changed very little over the past 100 years: their design is much better, and the materials are lighter and more reliable, but they still work the same way. Using computer vision, we have developed a prosthesis that can respond to objects automatically – just like a real hand. With it, the user can pick up a cup or a cookie by simply casting a short glance in their direction," said co–author Kianush Nazarpur, quoted by the university's press service.
As noted in the researchers' article (Ghazaei et al., Deep learning-based artificial vision for grasp classification in myoelectric hands, Journal of Neural Engineering, 2017), the prosthesis has already passed the first experimental tests with two volunteers: after an hour of training, the experimental participants successfully completed 88% of the tasks. Now specialists are preparing to offer to test the prosthesis to patients of one of the hospitals in Newcastle.
"Prosthetic limbs have changed very little over the past 100 years: their design is much better, and the materials are lighter and more reliable, but they still work the same way. Using computer vision, we have developed a prosthesis that can respond to objects automatically – just like a real hand. With it, the user can pick up a cup or a cookie by simply casting a short glance in their direction," said co–author of the work Kianush Nazarpour, quoted by the press service of the university (Hand that sees offers new hope to amputees).
As noted in the researchers' article, the prosthesis has already passed the first experimental tests with two volunteers: after an hour of training, the participants of the experiment successfully completed 88% of the tasks. Now specialists are preparing to offer to test the prosthesis to patients of one of the hospitals in Newcastle.
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10.05.2017