2023-10-05 06:30:29
A French-Japanese team of scientists is studying how the brain responds to the addition of a robotic limb, such as a sixth finger. Apparently pretty good since it takes less than an hour to adopt it. All that remains is to understand precisely how this is possible…
Increasing human physical capabilities through robotics, some people think regarding it, but do we know the real effects that these devices, such as exoskeletons, can have on us? By studying the reaction of our brain to the use of a sixth finger, this is what the French research team from the Montpellier Computer Science, Robotics and Microelectronics Laboratory (LIRMM) at the University wishes to determine. from Montpellier. “It is very important to know how these devices can affect our behavior as well as our brain, explains Ganesh Gowrishankar, researcher in robotics and neuroscience at LIRMM. Understanding this might help create ethical rules for their use. »
The sixth finger is controlled by measuring electrical signals from the muscles. Credit: Ganesh Gowrishankar /LIRMM
The sixth robotic finger, developed in collaboration with Professor Yoichi Miyawaki of the University of Electro-Communication in Tokyo (Japan), can be used independently of the five other biological ones. It even has haptic feedback allowing it to feel finger movements. The electrical signals from these muscles are measured by electromyogram (electrodes stuck to the skin), then transferred to the servo motor that controls the robotic finger. Using an algorithm, the team isolated the part of the muscular activity of the forearm that was not mobilized in the movements of the five biological fingers in order to use it to control the mechanical sixth. According to the researcher, it would take less than an hour for the brain to adopt it.
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Accept marketing cookies And to see the brain activity linked to the use of the finger, the researchers used a functional brain imaging technique, fMRI[1]which isolates specific areas of the brain associated with a particular perception or action, or cognition by an individual by detecting local changes in cerebral blood flow related to neuronal activity.
Better understand the brain
So how does the brain respond to the addition of a new limb? Previous experiments have already highlighted the brain’s ability to “accept” an external limb as an integral part of the bodyfor example by visually replacing the hand of an individual with its plastic clone. “In the brain, each limb has its place: if you lose your hand and replace it with another robotic one, the latter will take its place in the cerebral cortexaffirms Ganesh Gowrishankar. But thanks to our research, we know that the brain is also capable of accepting a new limb, a sixth finger. But where exactly? We know that its use is integrated into an unused part of the cerebral cortex. We have our idea of the exact location, but we need to confirm it with some experiments. »
[1] Functional magnetic resonance imaging
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