Health - a myocontrolled bionic hand

Walking, shaking hands, picking up an object - the simplest everyday movements are all under the brain's control. These basic movements are difficult for amputees to reproduce with prosthetic devices.

When a limb is amputated, the natural signals that carry the instruction from the central nervous system to muscles to perform a movement remain intact above the amputation site explained Eric Le Carpentier, Centrale Nantes professor and member of the ADTSI research team at IRCCyN. Our objective is to target these signals, understand and use them so that an amputee can control his/her prosthetic hand in a precise and satisfactory manner, so that an amputee can make subtler movements with his/her prosthetic device.
  Several years of laboratory development have allowed the IRCCyN researchers to devise an efficient inversion algorithm. Neural control thus reconstructed adequately accounts for movement in non-amputees. The objective is to test this algorithm to control a robotic hand. As the algorithm has a parallel structure, we are today looking to implant it on parallel processors such as graphic processors. We are also considering real-time communication with high performance computers, like the one at Centrale Nantes, which could replace embedded systems outlined Yannick Aoustin, of Nantes University and member of the robotics team at IRCCyN.

Other research work is also underway to improve the response of the robotic hand, through muscular model simulation.