This week Science Translational Medicine published an article outlining how researchers successfully gave amputees the ability to control their hands with their minds without undergoing an invasive or costly procedure. The key? Amplifying nerve signals via machine learning.
If given the ability to control their prosthetics with their mind, amputees could regain a wide variety of lost abilities which would, as a result, radically increase their standard of living. Unfortunately, though this has been the subject of research for years, most solutions were incredibly invasive, as the peripheral nerves that could deliver the necessary signals from the spinal cord and brain are too tiny.