AH, MY HAND! Luke Skywalker lost his hand a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away - but here in our own galaxy, how close are we to creating the advanced neuroprosthetics we see in Star Wars? On this episode of Neuro Transmissions, learn about advances in prosthetic hand design - and see just how close we are to building Luke’s Hand!

Huge thank yous to our friends and colleagues for their contributions to this video. Eric J. Earley can be found at http://www.twitter.com/ericjearley and at http://www.ericjearley.com. Jacob George spoke at SfN about the advances being made at the University of Utah on designing biofeedback-enabled prosthetic hands. His work can be found at http://www.bioen.utah.edu/cni/

PLEASE NOTE: at 5:13, it should be "detected from the remaining nerves", not "muscles". Jacob was kind enough to point out our error but the final edit didn't make it into the video!

Sources:

Historical prosthetics: https://daily.jstor.org/a-brief-history-of-prosthetic-limbs/

Body powered: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22773256

Myoelectric: https://www.ottobock.pl/media/local-media/pdf/clinical-res/final-myoelectric-compared-to-body-powered-prostheses-study-summaries.pdf

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4968852/

Brain-Machine Interfaces: http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.1001561

https://www.nature.com/articles/416141a

2002 experiment: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamaneurology/fullarticle/784743

Utah study: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/11/15/new-robotic-hand-named-after-luke-skywalker-helps-amputee-touch-and-feel-again/?utm_term=.e91ff35718ec

Support us on Patreon -

https://www.patreon.com/neurotransmissions/

Ryan M. Shaver, Carrie McKenzie, and Raymond Chin are our three Patreon Producers and they are a cool breeze on a hot day. Thanks you three! Also, big shoutout to our newest patrons and folks who have increased their pledges: Alex Dainis, Mary Smith, Susan Jones, and Memming Park!

Neuro Transmissions is a channel on a mission to bring neuroscience to everyone. It's not rocket surgery, it's brain science! Learn all sorts of fun and interesting things with Alie Astrocyte and Micah Psych every other Sunday by subscribing to the channel. Have a topic you want covered? Let us know in the comments. Share, like, and subscribe for more videos to come! Over and out.

Neuro Transmissions is on the other social medias too:

https://www.facebook.com/neurotransmissions

https://www.twitter.com/neuroyoutube

https://www.instagram.com/neurotransmissions

http://www.neurotransmissions.science

https://www.reddit.com/u/neuroyoutube/

Snapchat - @neuroyoutube