Report On Neuroprosthetics: Prosthetic For Piano Players

In this assignment, I’m going to be writing about neuroprosthetics, a combination of neuroscience and biomedical engineering. Neural prostheses are made, by using neural implants to replace a missing biological functionality. Science has made a lot of progress over the last 50 years and the technology became more and more advanced, neuroprosthetics is nowadays a solution for many people who are suffering from a malfunction of the human body. In this case, science will help musicians, in particular, piano players who due to an accident lost one or two of their upper limbs, just below the humerus. There are a lot of prosthetics on the market, but all for different functions, not all the implants are designed to move fingers or make particular moves, especially for piano players where coordination and continuous motion are more than necessary. In this assignment we will be looking at the best solutions in order to replace a missing biological functionality for a musician, giving advantages and disadvantages in order to solve the problem in the best possible way.

Body: According to( explain that stuff, Chris Woodford, February 19, 2018):

A neural prosthetic is an artificial substitute to replace a limb which is not in the place:

• Up the knee (transtibial)
• Above the knee (transfemoral)
• Under the elbow (transradial)
• Up the elbow (transhumeral) The connecting part of a prosthetic is called socket and it’s designed to fit perfectly your residual limb. According to (support tip, August 27, 2014)

There are five different types of Prosthetic hands:

Conventional or Body Powered Hand Prosthetics: This kind of prosthetic works with the use of a harness system. Making a particular movement of the body will command the harness system. The heavy-duty structure of the body-powered prosthetics makes it more durable. Because of it’s design, it is also perfect at proprioception and is lighter compared to the myoelectric ones. Conventional types are probably the less expensive prosthetics to purchase and will not require a lot of maintenance to the user. External Power or Myoelectric Hand Prosthetics: External hand prosthetics do not need the action of a harness system. Instead, the device is commanded by using an electric motor powered by batteries. EMG signals coming from the skin are recognized by the sensors inserted in the socket. The EMG signals are then transferred to a processor which takes charge of how the motor should function. For better results of this prosthetic, intensive training is required.

Cosmetic or Passive Functional Hand Prosthetics: Cosmetic hand prosthetics can be classified as an aesthetic device because it trays reproduce the look of the amputated hand and serves as a replacement. However, it can also help by assisting in simple carrying and balancing of things. This kind of prosthetic device is aesthetically helpful, it doesn’t require a lot of maintenance and is not heavy to use.

Hybrid Prosthetics: Putting together the functions of a conventional and myoelectric hand prosthetics it will become a hybrid type of prosthetic device. Hybrid hand prosthetics is usually indicated to persons with an amputation above the elbow Both the harness system and external source are powered by the elbow joint.

Recreational or Adaptive Hand Prosthetics: An adaptive or recreational hand prosthetics is custom-built according to particular requests and activities needed by the client. Pleasure activities like playing an instrument, sports (fencing, Scuba Diving, Mountaineering and Technical Climbing), shooting pool and construction work could necessitate some particular kind of upper extremity prosthetic that suits the movement person might want to do. Even though there are a lot of prosthetics on the market not all of them allow you to move your phalanges, an essential movement for your fingers, in order to play the piano. This is why the best solution is a recreational or adaptive hand prosthetics. In particular, the Luke Skywalker bionic hand, recently designed and approved by Jason Maderer a young drummer and piano player who lost his arm on an accident at work. According to (news. gatech. edu, by Jason Maderer, December 11, 2017) The Skywalker prosthesis looks like most of the prosthetics on the market. It’s guided by electromyogram (EMG) sensors attached to muscles. It’s possible to convert the prosthetic into various modes by pressing buttons. Each mode has two moves in the program, controlled by flexing or contracting forearm muscles.

For instance, flexing allows you to close the fist, contracting will close it. “EMG sensors are not very precise,” said Weinberg, director of Georgia Tech’s Center for Music Technology. “They can identify a muscle movement, but the signal is not good enough to understand which finger the person wants to move. They tried to make the pattern detection better from EMG but it couldn’t get the control of each finger” So the team decided to incorporate an ultrasound probe to the arm. The same kind of probe doctors uses to do an ultrasound, to watch how muscles moved. Weinberg and his team created an algorithm that can rapidly understand which finger the person wants to move.

The ultrasound signals and machine learning can determine continuous and simultaneous movements of each finger, and even the power the person intends to use. This is definitely the best solution for a pianist, but apart from all the advantages there is a big con, the price. According to (mddionline, Nancy Crotti, July 7,2015) The price for a Luke Skywalker prosthetic is estimated around 100,000 dollars versus 3000 to 5000 dollars for a normal prosthetics hand. Another con is probably the environmental impact, to design the socket of a prosthetic you need fiberglass, but there are some studies supporting the idea of replacing the conventional material with the bamboo fabric which has the same durability as fiberglass.