Robotic Arm that plays piano??

[lostinidlewonder]

This is an interesting article I read on www.virtualworldlets.net

By tapping directly into the brain's electrical signals, scientists at John's Hopkins University, in Baltimore, US, are on their way to developing a prosthetic hand more dextrous than ever before. They have demonstrated for the first time that neural activity recorded from a monkey's brain can control fingers on a robotic hand, making it play several notes on a piano.

"We would hope that eventually, we'll be able to implant similar arrays permanently in the motor cortex of human subjects," says Mark Schieber, a neuroscientist at the University of Rochester, in New York, who is working on the project. However, researchers caution that a practical human version of the neural interface is still a long way off.

In the long term, scientists would like to develop a prosthesis that is effortlessly controlled by the user's thoughts. "If you can tap into the brain, you can record from the brain itself the intent of hand and finger movement," says Nitish Thakor, a neuroengineer at John's Hopkins, who is working on the project.

To make the neural interface, researchers recorded brain-cell activity from monkeys as they moved their fingers in different ways. (A particular part of the motor cortex has previously been shown to control finger movement.) The scientists then created algorithms to decode these brain signals by identifying the specific activity patterns linked to particular movements. When the decoding system was connected to a robotic hand and fed new neural-activity patterns, the fingers on the hand performed the intended movement 95 percent of the time.

See the full Story via external site: www.technologyreview.com

[pianistimo]

scary!  now pianists will have to choose between their real arms (too slow) or a robotic arm (can play twice as fast).  or, they could play duets with themselves.

[babyblue]

It reminds me of the NS-5 robots in the movie<<I Robot>>, As I see it,Robots are cute because they are perfect,Human beeings are cute because they are not so perfect. Is music all about perfection? No! So I don't think we have to worry about that (at least not now )...