2024-01-26 06:30:00
The shopping bag under one arm, your child under the other… Are you overworked and dreaming of a little help? A third arm certainly won’t be too much! Thanks to scientists at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), in Switzerland, obtaining a functional additional limb is almost reality and not science fiction. At the end of 2023, they developed a robotic arm that can be controlled by breathing. Indeed, they discovered by conducting an experiment on 61 people during more than 150 sessions that a person’s control of the movements of the diaphragm did not interfere with the control of their “natural” arms, their speech or their gaze. .
Intuitive control
Installed in an exoskeleton and equipped with a virtual reality headset, the participants saw a right arm, a left arm and a third arm between the two. The researchers then asked them to tense their limbs one by one using the joysticks for the left and right arms and using their breathing for the central arm. Which they carried out without problem according to Giulia Dominijanni, doctoral student at the Neuro-X institute at EPFL. “Controlling the third arm with the diaphragm is very intuitive. Users learn very quickly to control the additional member,” she explains in a press release from the establishment.
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The team of researchers then repeated the experiment, this time with a physical robotic arm. It consisted of a rod that participants might extend by contracting the diaphragm or collapse by relaxing it. Ultimate goal for scientists? Better understand the human brain, and more particularly the nervous system. “We will exploit this knowledge to, for example, design aid devices for disabled people, or rehabilitation protocols following a stroke,” describes neuroengineer Silvestro Micera.
But for now, the professor and his team remain cautious. In the future, they will test more complex robotic devices which will have to carry out real tasks outside the laboratory. Only then will they be able to estimate the potential of controlling a new limb through breathing.
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