Triumph of the bionic limbs

Credit: Rehabilitation Institute of Chicargo/ Discover

http://discovermagazine.com/2013/jan-feb/94-triumph-of-the-bionic-limbs#.UQ0Vwf1hiK0 / Zac Vawter uses his thoughts to control a bionic leg up 103 flights of stairs Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago August Oscar Pistorius South African double amputee, sprinted into the 400-meter semifinals into Olympic history carbon-fiber feet Zac Vawter climbed to the top of Chicago’s Willis Tower Sears Tower bionic leg controlled by his thoughts athletes army prosthetics engineers software engineer, has even bigger implications for commonplace amputee challenges like walking up hills and stairs experimental technique targeted muscle reinnervation stray ends of nerves amputation site redirected into muscle elsewhere in the leg his brain sends messages down those nerves, the muscles contract, amplifying the signal. Engineers at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago put electrodes on Vawter’s thigh to detect the contractions and used a computer chip to translate them into commands for his motorized prosthetic patterns look like when Zac wants to bend his knee or climb the stairs machines become better integrated with the human body glimpsing a future without disabilities, says Hugh Herr, a pioneering prosthetics researcher at MIT /