New York Times Book Review noted yesterday the impetus of Iraq and Afghanistan troops coming home with limbs lost to IEDs to drive brain interfaces to artificial limbs.
“The Revolutionizing Prosthetics 2009 (RP 2009) team developed the first fully integrated prosthetic arm that can be controlled naturally, provide sensory feedback and allows for eight degrees of freedom—a level of control far beyond the current state of the art for prosthetic limbs. Through RICs Neural Engineering Center for Bionic Medicine, several researchers completed limb system includes a virtual environment used for patient training, clinical configuration and to record limb movements and control signals during clinical investigations.”