Gadgetory

chances are you've played a game or read a cyberpunk novel that's featured characters with super awesome Bionic body parts at some point Jax from Mortal Kombat Adam Jensen from Deus Ex or Barrett Wallace from Final Fantasy just to name a few and the idea of powered artificial limbs that work just as well as real ones or even better has long been a mainstay in fiction but could we be getting close to making this a reality for people who have been unlucky enough to lose an arm or a leg if so it'll have been a long time coming false limbs and digits made from materials such as wood iron and leather have been in use for millennia everywhere from ancient Egypt to the Roman Republic to the high seas of the 16th century where peg legs were famously used by pirates but even though prosthetics have been around a long time for the vast majority of their history they didn't provide much functionality other than aesthetics except for artificial legs that would at least allow a person to stand and while various people over the centuries have created designs to make prosthetics more functional such as rudimentary joints at the knees the biggest advancements have been made in the past few decades modern manufacturing processes have allowed the production of artificial limbs that often look like the real deal and also seriously improve the quality of life for the people who use them and computer-aided design has enabled precise measurement and modeling of prosthetic body parts customized for each patient as well as the manufacturer of high quality joints and moving parts modeled closely after their natural counterparts additionally materials like silicon and polyvinyl carbonate have been used for artificial skin and hair so that prosthetics don't have to look like and for feel like cold hunks of metal or plastic but how do patients actually control these things many prosthetics work with mechanical systems powered by the user's own body for example artificial hands that can open and shut thanks to a cable system that can be operated with simple gestures such as moving a shoulder other prosthetics use mile electrics the electrical impulses that contract your muscles so you'll have electrodes that are at hatched to the same place as the prosthetic that can pick up these impulses and send them to the artificial limb which then moves according to what the patient wants it to do but the real excitement in the fields surrounds prosthetics that are controlled completely by thought the same way you'd control an original body part in recent years scientists have developed sensors that can be directly implanted beneath the skin and that interface with the nerves so that when the brain sends an impulse to your arm that says hey pick up that canna soda the sensor can send that impulse to a processor which will direct the limb to follow your brains orders cool right we're even seeing this technology take a step further with sensors embedded in prosthetic hands to send signals to the brain and restore a patient's sense of touch just like Luke Skywalker in the Empire Strikes Back and this new generation of smart prosthetics doesn't stop at artificial limbs people who suffer from impaired vision may have more options in the future as AI implants that project images directly onto the retina could help patients that have suffered physical trauma and implants that make contact with the brain hooked up to a small camera could bypass the eye entirely and provide your brain's Vision Center with images from the outside world just don't expect anything that will let you see through walls anytime soon unless of course you're the NSA speaking of walls let's break down some barriers here with fresh books and when I talk barriers that fresh books can break down I'm not talking walls I'm talking business barriers fresh books is on a mission to make freelancers and small business owners less stressed and more organized with their easy-to-use tools for crafting and 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