Tuesday, December 7, 2010

120 Band-aides

Today we did a high density EMG, ~120 sensors in a grid over my entire residual limb.  The goal was to map out all the motor units for about a dozen different motions - including big toe up & down.  The goal as I understand it is to push the limit and determine how much information can be gathered from the re-innervated sites + the muscles in the rest of my residual limb.

After all of the signals have been processed it should result in some pretty cool graphics, communicating what things are firing when I think about doing various motions.

I've asked for a copy of the ~1.5 GB of data gathered, but I'm not sure if they can give it to me.  I'd love to crunch it myself.  I don't think they've had a patient quite like me.  :-)

Oh, and yes it felt like pulling off 120 Band-aides, one at a time when we were done.

Monday, December 6, 2010

Hi-Tech leg fun

This week I'll be in Chicago at RIC, Center for Bionic Medicine doing some experiments with neural controls for powered prosthetics.

Today I had 24 EMG sensors on my stump for ~ 6 hours.  We did various iterations of gathering data, traning classifiers, checking classifier accuracy against more gathered test data, then using those classifiers to realtime control a virtual limb.  By the end of the day I was able to fairly accurately control flexion & extension of both my lower leg & ankle ( on a virtual avatar, mechanical devices to come later ).  Very cool stuff.