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人类之所以从各种动物斗争之中胜出,并大量繁衍,最终成为地球霸主,主导着世界的一切,甚至还尝试着与大自然做斗争。人类伴随着演化生存至今,从树上到地上,解放出来的双手帮助我们解决生存过程中的很多问题,所以除了凌驾于其他生物之上的智能之外,我们的四肢也是优胜劣汰的主要优势之一。
首先,小编作为一个四肢健全的正常人感到非常庆幸,因为残疾人的生活不论是现实或是心理都是很困难的,因为身体缺陷,他们无法像正常人一样轻松地完成一些任务。就算是现在医疗手段发达,有条件可以为你的身体装上义肢,但义肢和真正的肉体相比,还是有巨大差别的,义肢毕竟只是一个机械装置,你的大脑并感觉不到义肢的存在。
根本的原因在于,每当你想要指挥你的义肢产生某种行为,你需要从大脑中的神经元发送信号传送到你的截肢部位与义肢的交界处,让神经信号转化为某种机械传导,从而控制假肢的行动,遗憾的是,假肢的行为不会向你的大脑提交报告,产生一种奇怪的效果:当你控制假肢,假肢确实动了,但你并没有感觉到你的假肢动了。就好比你用假肢踢墙,假肢并不会反馈给你痛觉和假肢的空间感觉。
随着未来科技的发展,假肢会如何定义人类,来听听这15分钟的视频解读。
Beyond bionics
how the future of prosthetics
is redefining humanity
↓↓↓ 上下滑动,查看解说稿 ↓↓↓
Lose your arm and it's like: 'Oh, woe is me.
Life sucks.' Six years later, here I am, hopefully about to develop some of the best technology for people out there.
Evolution hasn’t stopped just because we are here.
We probably are becoming the first species that is capable to influence its own evolution.
I can have this hand look any way I want.
What if I don’t want a hand? What if I want a tentacle? Modern advances in the world of prosthetics are changing lives across the globe.
Where once there was stigma, amputees are now empowered and enhanced.
From low-cost 3D printed designs to hi-tech innovations, I wanted to see how access to these technologies has changed, what further developments are around the corner and what ethical battles lie ahead.
This is bionic actor Angel Giuffria.
Angel is a congenital amputee, born without her left hand.
Is it safer to do it with your other arm? Yeah … We met up at her home on Louisiana’s Pearl River.
My mum was put on bed rest a few weeks before I was born, had no idea that I was going to have one arm.
She happened to see a programme on TV, no joke, about the first ever myoelectrics for children being brought into the United States.
She cried the whole thing, right? Because she was pregnant.
‘These babies, they are giving them arms, that's so great’, right? And then, two weeks later, she has a baby, missing her hand.
My mum was like: ‘Oh great, I know where I can get her one.’ And everyone thought she had lost it, right? She was like: ‘These tiny little robot hands, I’ve seen them for babies.’ Angel is the youngest baby in the world to receive a myoelectric arm.
Surprisingly, many doctors are still in the dark about today’s prosthetics technology.
They just, with ultrasound, thought her arm was in a shadow.
So, we didn’t know, until right then.
They were telling me that I would have to put a harness on our little girl that was controlled by a pulley that opened a hook.
Prosthetics technology has gone from hooks, like this, to hands with limited motion, like this.
In the future they will look and move like this.
And I will tell you this thing is kind of heavy.
Let's see - oh goodness.
First day of school, we'd stand up in front of the class, just from when I was five years old, and then I would talk about my arm.
I would take it off and I would show it to them.
I thought it was so cool.
I never thought there was an issue with my arm.
And then, I met kids and I met other adults and I started to realise that everyone doesn't think this is as cool as I do.
You know, I had kids that were afraid of me.
I had a kid that cried when I took off my arm.
What kind of a toll do you think that took on you? I have one hand.
A big thing about this one was I was tired of telling people that I had one hand.
We're having a conversation, say we just met, and the whole time in my head I'd be going: 'Did they notice yet? Did they notice yet? Did they notice yet?' And I was like: 'Oh they noticed.
OK, I should probably bring it up.' Like you would see them do this and be like: 'OK, something's wrong with her hand', right? This was the first of the multi-articulating hands.
It had a glove over it and I didn't like it.
So I took it off.
Look how big it is.
It's heavy as well.
Yes, this was the first hand that came out.
With an arm like this, I would image it's a lot more empowering.
This is now mine.
I designed this.
This looks the way I want it to look.
So, I think it helps a lot with wanting to wear the device, wanting to learn to use the device.
This is out there and this is OK.
And I think that does get rid of a lot of the stigma that's attached to it.
Because stigma implies it's something you should be embarrassed about and we're not.
A cutting-edge bionic arm like Angel's can cost upwards of £20,000 but even people without access to such funds have options thanks to the revolution in 3D printing.
I paid a visit to Callum and Jamie Miller at their home in County Durham.
This arm is all 3D printed, most of it in plastic except from the part where it connects to all of the fingers which helps me move it.
All of these, they can't move unless you pull it there.
So, when I do that it makes me clench my fist.
After finding out that the waiting list for a printed prosthetic arm was 18 months long, Callum struck upon an idea.
Some advert just popped up on my Facebook page for a 3D printer.
3D technology, I've never dealt with it, never done anything with it at all.
It is mesmerising.
You just sit there watching it doing something, gazing at it just printing something from nothing at the end of the day.
How long do you find yourself wearing them? If I am comfortable, like for the first hour, than I am probably comfortable for the next five hours.
Can you release it? It makes me feel emotional when I watch him doing stuff for the first time.
'Oh my god!' Creating your own prosthetic arms at home means an inevitable fusion of the ordinary with the extraordinary.
This is what, three months since you got the printer? So, what's next? We've looked at the myo-electronics which work on muscle movements those senses then go to turn a motor to open and close, which means he's not having to bend anymore.
Do you think it's brought you closer together? I don't think we're any closer now than we were before Christmas, are we? Not really.
We talk to each other a lot more.
Do we? [Laughs] In Mcdonough, Georgia, I caught up with musician Jason Barnes.
Hi Jason.
Hey, how is it going? Good, thank you! We listened for the drums and just kept coming.
Oh, yeah ...
Unlike Angel and Jamie, Jason is an acquired amputee, having lost his hand in an accident at work.
Wrong place, wrong time scenario, a transformer overloaded and arced a bolt of electricity into my back.
When it happened, I was standing in a puddle of water with rubber boots on.
So the electricity, I wasn't grounded, so it couldn't pass through me.
So that's where it did the damage, it went to the left side and exited through the right side of my body.
I woke up in the hospital and had no idea what happened.
I just remember being burnt and the explosion sound.
So I was just like, 'did something like blow up or like something happened, you know?' And they were like: 'no, you got electrocuted.' And I was just like: 'what?' I had no idea.
Jason doesn't remember anything ...
We didn't even know what hospital was he in.
I didn't even know where he was working that day and he was just totally burnt, you know, his eyebrows and eye lashes were singed off.
His doctors said: 'OK, we are going to take him off to surgery.' And I said: 'Surgery? why?' And they said 'Well, because we have to splay his arm open.' It was horrible.
We talked and, you know, when we made the decision to amputate his arm, he just kind of broke down in my arms and said: 'Mum, I'm never gonna play the drums again and my life's over.' You know, that's what he thought.
I was depressed beyond the normal person at that point in time.
I finally was like here recovering and I just got so bored one day that's when I dragged the drum kit out and I was like: 'You know, I'm gonna tape the drumstick to my arm.' And then started playing I will never forget that feeling, but when I went out there playing it was just like: 'I can still do this.' You know what I mean? This is the turning point.
There's no point in trying to stop.
Jason took me to Georgia Tech University in Atlanta, where he's been working with musician and inventor Gil Weinberg on several limb adaptations that push at the boundaries of music.
He wanted to recreate the motion of the wrist so he can hold the stick tight but then I asked him if he's willing to play with us and do something different and more.
By having a second stick, now Jason can create all kind of polyrhythms because one of them can play 19-hits-per-second the other one can play 20-hits-per-second and create all kind of sophisticated rhythms that no [other] humans can do.
And this very much bridges the biological and the technological.
We later figured it out that with ultrasound we can actually have much more control.
We can try to predict finger-by-finger, continuous control of each finger based on how his muscles in there, in your residual limb move.
So that would be my pinky and then this would be my index.
So the image looks completely different in the ultrasound.
How does the ultrasound technology compare to the traditional electrode approach? With ultrasound, it allows for individual finger control and continuous control on top of it.
What's being done at the moment to improve what you have here? All the hardware built into the arm so it doesn't have to be connect to a computer and everything's smaller so we could eventually, hopefully, replace the more traditionally used EMG technology.
There's a great deal of research going on at the moment in this field – kind of where robotics and science, and medicine all kind of meet – but a lot of this work is perhaps a bit more invasive but potentially can yield even greater results.
I am not in the position to ask Jason even though I am sure he would say yes, to inject something into his body or to implant something into his brain.
If anyone would do it it's probably Jason but I would like a doctor to do that and we will be excited to see what they come up with.
Scientists at Duke University in North Carolina, are working on such research with profound implications for the future of our species.
So this is ...
The tiny little sensors, these are wires, micro-wires, that are implanted in the brain, from where you can record the electrical signals produced by neurons.
This is the electronics that I applied on top of it to basically amplify, filter and broadcast these signals.
Miguel Nicolelis is a Brazilian neuroscientist who rose to prominence in 2014 when his mind-powered exoskeleton helped a paralysed man deliver the first kick of the World Cup.
And we are showing to the world, that there is hope.
Getting a paraplegic to move ...
Here we were, using science and the human spirit to do it.
And he did, it was a humble kick it was a tiny thing compared to what would come in the future, of course, but the symbolism, of that moment, for me, I will never forget.
I mean, it was incredible.
Miguel invited me into his lab, where he recreated an example of his current research for our camera.
We have here a wheelchair, driven by the brain of the monkey that is trying to reach the location in the room where he can collect a reward.
This monkey is imagining the kind of trajectory that he has to produce to get there.
How necessary is it that we do this research with animals? I introduced this concept in 1999/2000 with two papers one in rats and one in monkeys that are describing what is considered today the modern configuration of a brain-machine interface.
About 14 years later, we made eight paraplegic patients walk again for the first time in a decade.
I think the justification is pretty obvious, very clear.
As soon as we started doing that, we realised that the brain-machine interfaces could be very useful for a new generation of prosthetic devices.
Are there dangers around this technology? I am much more concerned about we mimicking our digital machines.
We probably are becoming the first species that is capable to influence its own evolution by what it produces: our technology.
Because we are creating complete new constrains on how humans, socialise, communicate, mate ...
So, we are actually creating a new pathway, without even knowing.
What is humanity? An increasingly complex evolutionary process guided and enabled by science and technology.
What kind of arm do you think you might have in 10 years time? Unrealistically, I would like to see a hand almost fully functional, you know, sensory feedback, hot and cold pressure sensitive.
[Music] When we invented the wheel and engineered spacecraft, we transcended our limitations.
In the 21st century, we are now fast-approaching the age of the cybernetic being (unclear) and genetically modified.
This is trans-humanism.
There is definitely a positive.
Every single bad thing or negative thing that happens, there is something good that comes out of it.
You've just got to find it sometimes and run with it, you know? Do you fancy a proper bionic arm that you can feel everything just like the other hand it has sensory feedback? I am not sure really because I want to know how you get it and if you need to do anything else to your arm and stuff.
Well, I suppose you'd need to have maybe even some implants in your brain and things like that.
I might just stick with the sensors.
Yeah.
Fair enough.
Stop it.
Looking at Angel now, could you ever have imagined that she'd be sitting here with all bionic limb with flashing lights? We were told one day she would have every finger and you know, it would happen.
I am very, very proud of her.
Like, I always say when I grow up I want to be just like her because she was just like I asked for.
She was perfect.
How does that make you feel? I say it all the time when she's not around, right? I get to talk about of how much she did for me and I don't tell her enough to her face, I guess, that it matters, and it's important and I am so happy you are my mum and that I had you cheering me on and making me feel proud of being different and not that different was bad.
Around my life I have people that say things: 'Wow, I like your arm better than mine,' or 'I might get one of those.' When you start thinking, if someone's voluntarily replacing their limbs ...
Ethics, when it comes to bionics, robotics, AI, all these things are going to be huge.
Can you do everything? You can even text? I can text if I want to, yeah.
– Oh my god! I mean ...
We need to make sure that we are prepared for these kind of issues because we are not going to be ready for it and then it's going to happen.
and then we go: 'how do we handle it?' How long you even had it? Oh, hell yeah! That's awesome as hell.
There's going to be restrictions eventually and they're going to say: 'you can't do that.' Why not? You know, why can't I do the things that I want? People that have the need to make these modifications to their bodies, they can.
But they have the choice.
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