Scientists in Newcastle have developed a cheap way of helping amputees with prosthetic limbs reach out and grasp objects - a bionic "hand that sees".
The hand was developed by bioengineers at Newcastle University who modified a standard NHS myoelectric hand with a cheap camera to provide upper-limb amputees with a more functional prosthetic.
Myoelectric hands allow amputees to make their prosthetics express different grips using sensors on the skin surface of the stump which detect the electrical activity of wearers' muscles.
With the added camera, which the researchers say they purchased for 99p, the new device bypasses the usual processes of gripping with a myoelectric hand, which require the user to see the object, physically stimulate the muscles in their arm and trigger a movement in the prosthetic limb.
The wearer points the camera at the object they want to grasp, tenses their arm muscles and the prosthetic controller automatically recognises the shape and adopts the correct grip to pick it up.
To achieve this the Newcastle team had to teach the prosthetic controller how to recognise different shapes and select which grip to use.
"We would show the computer a picture of, for example, a stick," explained Ghazal Ghazaei, the lead author behind the research, which was published today in the Journal of Neural Engineering.
"But not just one picture, many images of the same stick from different angles and orientations, even in different light and against different backgrounds and eventually the computer learns what grasp it needs to pick that stick up.
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