Jim Ashworth-Beaumont

I think so, yeah, definitely.

Well, there's a kind of a meeting of different technologies now, neurology, robotics or bionics or cybernetics.

They're all coming together to try and solve these problems.

And in terms of like the actual structure of the limbs themselves, the bottleneck is probably in prosthetics.

Taking the information, the brain intent, as it were, the mental intent, and actually getting that into the limb to move the limb.

Absolutely.

So here's the problem.

When you have an amputation, that nerve signal is broken.

Yeah.

And you lose a lot of complexity of information.

So actually trying to either get that richness of information into the limb or compensate it for it in some way has resulted in a few different approaches.

One is essentially trying to tap directly into the nervous system in order to get that information to the limb.

So you might be looking at a brain computer interface, these chips that you put into the brain.

or trying to identify the nerves that would drive the prosthesis, tap into those.

So really, to be honest with you, the simpler the better.

I'd rather not have a brain interface if I could help it.

But certainly there are technologies which try to understand the pattern of electrical information on the surface of the stump and translate that into information that will drive the prosthesis in a kind of dexterous way.

Stuff that's happening at some academic level.

Right.

Or commercial level.