Targeted Reinnervation - Future Research and Development

Future Research and Development

The team has now moved onto a trial with transhumeral amputees (amputation at the elbow level), with the hope that median nerve transfer in transradial amputation could potentially provide thumb control. With all previous patients being upper limb amputees, the team also hopes to move on to lower limb amputees eventually.

The nerves could also be further split to provide even more independent signals, so that more functions can be controlled simultaneously and more degrees of freedom can be gained in prosthesis control. This could also prompt the production of more sophisticated prosthetic devices with more degrees of freedom, such as the six-motor experimental prosthesis mentioned above.

Targeted reinnervation could also utilize implantable electrodes to record more localized signals from the target muscle, so that crosstalk can be further mitigated.

Much work is still to be done to translocate the sensory feedback from the reinnervated target muscle to the actual prosthesis, or to construct prostheses that are capable of providing appropriate stimuli to the reinnervated target muscle according to the external stimuli received, so that the sensory feedback of the arm comes from its native physical position.

Read more about this topic:  Targeted Reinnervation

Famous quotes containing the words future, research and/or development:

    He who asks fortune-tellers the future unwittingly forfeits an inner intimation of coming events that is a thousand times more exact than anything they may say. He is impelled by inertia, rather than curiosity, and nothing is more unlike the submissive apathy with which he hears his fate revealed than the alert dexterity with which the man of courage lays hands on the future.
    Walter Benjamin (1892–1940)

    It is a good morning exercise for a research scientist to discard a pet hypothesis every day before breakfast. It keeps him young.
    Konrad Lorenz (1903–1989)

    The experience of a sense of guilt for wrong-doing is necessary for the development of self-control. The guilt feelings will later serve as a warning signal which the child can produce himself when an impulse to repeat the naughty act comes over him. When the child can produce his on warning signals, independent of the actual presence of the adult, he is on the way to developing a conscience.
    Selma H. Fraiberg (20th century)