Advanced Prosthetics

Thanks to advances in modern medicine, many more people are surviving traumatic injuries and are living with the resulting loss of function, often being fitted with a prosthesis. But for many people suffering from that loss of function, every day is a challenge as they struggle to use their prostheses for simple daily tasks. As surgical techniques continue to advance, the science of prosthetics struggles to keep up. In fact, the basic mechanical prosthetic arm hasn\u27t seen any significant design changes since the American Civil War. The field of neural prosthetics hopes to change that. A neural prosthetic is any device that seeks to replace a cognitive, sensory, or motor modality that has been lost to injury or disease. Modern devices are no longer controlled by awkward muscle contractions and steel cables on pulleys (although those are still popular for their robustness). Rather, they are controlled by the user\u27s nervous system and articulated by servos. This paper seeks to provide an overview of the major types of neural prostheses in use today, and explain how they function