Researchers at MIT have developed a new prosthetic leg that can be controlled via brain signals, an achievement that could greatly enhance the experience of walking with a bionic limb for amputees., the researchers found that their "neuroprosthetic" increased walking speed by a whopping 41 percent compared to a control group who received conventional prostheses, "enabling equivalent peak speeds to persons without leg amputation.
To enable a more natural gait, Herr and his colleagues came up with the AMI surgery to allow muscles to still communicate with each other inside of the residual limb. "Because of the AMI neuroprosthetic interface, we were able to boost that neural signaling, preserving as much as we could," said lead author and MIT Media Lab postdoc Hyungeun Song. "This was able to restore a person's neural capability to continuously and directly control the full gait, across different walking speeds, stairs, slopes, even going over obstacles."
"This work represents yet another step in us demonstrating what is possible in terms of restoring function in patients who suffer from severe limb injury," coauthor and Harvard Medical School associate professor Matthew Carty added.