Speaker 1: Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Speaker 1: Forward Thinking. Welcome everyone to Forward Thinking, the podcast that's Bigger, Faster, Stronger.
Speaker 1: I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland, and I am joined by
Speaker 1: Lauren Vocalban and Joe McCormick, and we wanted to talk
Speaker 1: about transhumanism, but specifically about how prostheses have changed over
Speaker 1: the years and how they're going to change in the future,
Speaker 1: and h the interfaces that we will use between our
Speaker 1: brains and a robotic prosthetic for those of us who
Speaker 1: need to be fitted with them. Um. And to really
Speaker 1: understand about the development of prosthetics, you just got to
Speaker 1: look back a few decades really to see how far
Speaker 1: we've come. Because Dean Cayman, who is a developer of
Speaker 1: many technologies, one of the most famous being the segue,
Speaker 1: but also of something called the Luke arm, which we'll
Speaker 1: talk about in a little bit, said, you know, you
Speaker 1: just look at the development. If you looked at prosthetic legs,
Speaker 1: they had progressed quite a bit over the last several decades,
Speaker 1: but prosthetic arms had not. Essentially, if you had lost,
Speaker 1: say a hand, you would get it replaced with a hook,
Speaker 1: and maybe a few years later they developed it where
Speaker 1: you could have a hook that would have a clamp
Speaker 1: essentially on it that would be attached to other muscles,
Speaker 1: and when you would clinch those muscles, you could make
Speaker 1: the clampch other. Yeah, you can pinch things, pick things up,
Speaker 1: but still very limited mobility, very limited utility, and that
Speaker 1: this this sort of state of affairs lasted way too long.
Speaker 1: Though it's surely not because the designers were lazy. Right,
Speaker 1: this is really hard to do. Yeah, no, it's it's
Speaker 1: incredibly tricky to design a limb that can replace something
Speaker 1: as versatile as the as a human arm. When you
Speaker 1: think about, um, the human arm, and you think about
Speaker 1: how many degrees of freedom you need right to do
Speaker 1: something as complex as say playing a guitar, or even
Speaker 1: just like eating spaghetti, even just picking up a cup.
Speaker 1: But when you're not entirely sure how how hard the
Speaker 1: cup is. That's that's not a thing that you find
Speaker 1: out until you touch it. And you've got this incredibly
Speaker 1: complex feedback system, right, yeah, how heavy it might be,
Speaker 1: so you have to be you know, we take it
Speaker 1: for granted, those of us who have all our limbs,
Speaker 1: We take it for granted, because that's our daily experience, right.
Speaker 1: So it's only when something has happened where uh, we
Speaker 1: need to have a limb replaced, or maybe we were
Speaker 1: born without a limb, that this really becomes a consideration
Speaker 1: that you know, we think about for any length of time.
Speaker 1: Otherwise it's just this is just life. I just just
Speaker 1: reach over and pick up a cup, yeah, which of
Speaker 1: course happens all the time. And going way back into
Speaker 1: history with with War, I mean especially in history because
Speaker 1: we had less good medical technology, and less good was
Speaker 1: pretty much a mark of history as far as the
Speaker 1: medical technology went vocal bound. But I say worst things
Speaker 1: on a nearly minute by minute basis. You're good. It's
Speaker 1: a good word. Um, but you know, and then you've
Speaker 1: got you've got all kinds of of science fiction things
Speaker 1: like like a Star Wars where where you know, Luke
Speaker 1: loses a hand and I've only made word my way
Speaker 1: up to episode two OMG spoilers, or even even an
Speaker 1: Army of Darkness where you know, Ash goes back in
Speaker 1: time and somehow can cos this mechanical hand of the gauntlet.
Speaker 1: It's groovy. I will say it's groovy. For the longest time,
Speaker 1: we were looking at pretty limited prosthetic arms. Uh. And
Speaker 1: really that's where a lot of the focus on the
Speaker 1: technology has been recently. Although we've seen other type of
Speaker 1: of robotic aids, uh, not just for arms, but things
Speaker 1: like cochlear implants things like that. But but arms are
Speaker 1: really what we were focusing on today. Well, it seems
Speaker 1: that what's the difficulty. Hear right, We can create robotic
Speaker 1: arms these days that are incredibly precise. And I'm not
Speaker 1: talking about the kind of arms you put on a person, right,
Speaker 1: You're talking about our stationary arm that might work on manufacturing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: go look at a you know, like an auto production
Speaker 1: facility and look at the amazing arms they can build.
Speaker 1: The problem doesn't seem to be anymore the design of
Speaker 1: the arm itself, but the interface between the arm and
Speaker 1: the human brain that controls it. To be fair, there's
Speaker 1: also I'm sorry, Lauren, go ahead, Oh no, no no, no, no,
Speaker 1: I was just gonna say, you know, we still know
Speaker 1: more about robotic mechanics than we really do about human
Speaker 1: brain mechanics because the way that neurons work is kind
Speaker 1: of mysterious. Right, And and on top of that, just
Speaker 1: to go back to another challenge that auto assembly arm
Speaker 1: probably weighs several hundred pounds. So so, well we did
Speaker 1: one thing, well we can well we did one job, right,
Speaker 1: you had one thing to do today, but it did
Speaker 1: it right six thousand times right. But but again, you're
Speaker 1: talking about something that was made for industrial use. You're
Speaker 1: talking about something that is meant to replace a lost
Speaker 1: human limb. Obviously, things you have to worry about, not
Speaker 1: just our usability, but how heavy is it? It needs
Speaker 1: to be like cost, the cause, well the cost also,
Speaker 1: but really, I mean putting costs aside for now, how
Speaker 1: heavy is it? You've got to make it light enough
Speaker 1: so that a human being can can use this comfortably
Speaker 1: or else it's not useful, right, It's not not something
Speaker 1: that's going to increase someone's quality of life, which is
Speaker 1: really what we're talking about here. So it needs to
Speaker 1: be light. It needs to be efficient because if you
Speaker 1: have to constantly uh plug it in because the batteries
Speaker 1: are draining, then that would be a quality of life
Speaker 1: issue as well. It needs to be versatile. It needs
Speaker 1: to be able to give you some sort of sensory
Speaker 1: feedback because if you have a robotic arm that has
Speaker 1: a ability to grip but no feedback. You wouldn't know
Speaker 1: how hard to grip something before picking up. You could
Speaker 1: shatter glass just squishing cups of coffee at the right
Speaker 1: You wouldn't want to do that, obviously, if you were
Speaker 1: unable to determine how tightly you were squeezing them without
Speaker 1: I mean hearing them squeal in pain obviously. So so
Speaker 1: these are challenges. I mean, they're real challenges. It seems
Speaker 1: kind of easy to make light of it, but when
Speaker 1: you think of it from an engineering standpoint, these are
Speaker 1: real challenges to overcome, and uh, to kind of talk
Speaker 1: about where we've been. Recently, Dean came in again, the
Speaker 1: guy who invented the segue. He took on a project
Speaker 1: that he ended up calling the Luke Arm, and he
Speaker 1: named it after the character from the Star Wars series,
Speaker 1: Luke Skywalker who the Star Wars series. Yes, it's a series,
Speaker 1: a series of three, wouldn't it wouldn't it be nice
Speaker 1: if they made some Star Wars prequels. I bet those
Speaker 1: would be swell. I love making that joke every time
Speaker 1: we bring this up. But yes, Star Wars, of course,
Speaker 1: Luke Skywalker has his arm lopped off by his daddy
Speaker 1: Darth Vaders spoiler alert and Empire states his hand but
Speaker 1: go on, it's it is just his hand. But he
Speaker 1: ends up having more than just the hand replaced because
Speaker 1: you can see it in the wrist right because anyway,
Speaker 1: so he has his hand replaced with a robotic So
Speaker 1: Dean came in name his robotic arm after that character,
Speaker 1: Luke Skywalker and uh. And what happened was he was
Speaker 1: actually approached by the United States government and they were
Speaker 1: telling him, listen, we have a lot of servicemen and
Speaker 1: women coming back from overseas who have suffered injuries in
Speaker 1: the line of duty. And while we can do a
Speaker 1: lot for anyone who's lost a leg, because the technology
Speaker 1: has really improved quite a bit so that people can
Speaker 1: get around with some you know, limited mobility, but better
Speaker 1: off than they were. Uh, that technology hasn't really advanced
Speaker 1: to arms, so if someone's lost an arm, we don't
Speaker 1: have really anything sophisticated to help replace it. And so
Speaker 1: they gave him a challenge and they said, we need
Speaker 1: you to develop a technology that will allow a person
Speaker 1: who has lost all or part of an arm to
Speaker 1: have essentially the same mobility they would have if they
Speaker 1: still had their arm. The it can't weigh more than
Speaker 1: a normal quote unquote an average relations a normal and
Speaker 1: average human arm. Uh, and it needs to have some
Speaker 1: sort of sensory feedback so know how tightly to grip
Speaker 1: something when you're picking it up and uh. And at
Speaker 1: first Dean came in said, Wow, I don't know that
Speaker 1: this is possible, because you're talking about developing something that's
Speaker 1: that's really light advanced in light. Those are the two things, right.
Speaker 1: And needed to have a lot of technology in it.
Speaker 1: And it needed to have and needed to be made
Speaker 1: out of the material and enough with enough power but
Speaker 1: still be light so that someone would not feel like
Speaker 1: it's a burden to wear it. And so they developed
Speaker 1: this Luke arms system and the early ones had an
Speaker 1: interface that was completely I mean, it was electronic, but
Speaker 1: it was similar to like a mechanical system in the
Speaker 1: sense that you would have buttons that you would operate,
Speaker 1: but with your feet you would wear uh, you know,
Speaker 1: your shoes would have the controls in them, and by
Speaker 1: putting pressure on your toes or the balls of your
Speaker 1: feet or the heels, you could make the arm do
Speaker 1: different things like rise. There's a great video that shows Uh,
Speaker 1: an amputee who has lost nearly all of one arm
Speaker 1: and all of the other arm, and uh, and he's
Speaker 1: wearing a Luke arm that gives him the ability. I
Speaker 1: think it's his left arm that he's he's got now
Speaker 1: with the Luke arm, where he can do things like
Speaker 1: if he leans forward, the arm bends at the elbow,
Speaker 1: so he can bend his bring his hand closer to
Speaker 1: his face. And if he leans back, then it extends
Speaker 1: the elbow. And then by operating a switch with by
Speaker 1: by leaning his neck just a little bit, he could
Speaker 1: change it so he could rotate the wrist by doing
Speaker 1: those same commands. So through a series of subtle and
Speaker 1: these are so it's not like it's not like he
Speaker 1: has to lean way forward to have this happen, but
Speaker 1: a few subtle muscular movements, he can operate this robotic arm.
Speaker 1: So that's one form of interface. Now granted, in this case,
Speaker 1: you really have to train yourself how to operate this
Speaker 1: robotic arm using all these different emotions. It's almost like
Speaker 1: in a way playing a video game, manipulating a digital
Speaker 1: care through physical controls, same sort of thing. You're not
Speaker 1: You're not sending commands directly from the brain to the
Speaker 1: robotic arm you're doing. You're saying, all right, well, here's
Speaker 1: what I need to do. I need to lift my
Speaker 1: arm up, So I have to put pressure on my
Speaker 1: toes so that I can give the command to lift
Speaker 1: up the arm. It has to become second nature. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And any prosthesis is going to involve people learning those
Speaker 1: kind of commands. They're they're making these retinal prostheses these
Speaker 1: days that have an array of electrodes and in place
Speaker 1: of the cells that would normally detect light for you,
Speaker 1: and and they're they're hooked up to a kind of
Speaker 1: kind of like Google glasses, sort of like a little
Speaker 1: video camera and glasses that you can wear, and um,
Speaker 1: the glasses tell you when you're seeing something. They send
Speaker 1: a signal back to the electrodes, the electrodes and a
Speaker 1: signal to your brain. But it's not like you're seeing it.
Speaker 1: You have to learn how to interpret the messages like
Speaker 1: you might. You might see blocks that are representing an
Speaker 1: object in your in your field of view, and the
Speaker 1: greater the resolution that the more blocks you will see
Speaker 1: and the closer those blocks will resemble whatever the shape is.
Speaker 1: So in general, with these right now, the state of
Speaker 1: the art as I understand it is that it lets
Speaker 1: you see that there's a shape in front of you,
Speaker 1: but it doesn't really give you a lot of definition yet.
Speaker 1: But it's incredibly promising. But we're always trying to get closer,
Speaker 1: aren't we? And there there are some people who have
Speaker 1: gotten amazingly close, as it seems to me. And by close,
Speaker 1: I'm talking about the connection between the brain and the
Speaker 1: movement of the press theses, uh, in a way that
Speaker 1: feels natural. Now, when you go to move your your arm,
Speaker 1: assuming you haven't a regular human arm that's still attached
Speaker 1: to you just like most people have, UM, you don't
Speaker 1: have to think about a series of commands to do it.
Speaker 1: It's intuitive, right. You just think move and it moves.
Speaker 1: You think pinch and it pinches. Could we get there? Well,
Speaker 1: that's something I think a lot of people who design
Speaker 1: press theses have been thinking about for a long It's
Speaker 1: a great goal, right. And so I saw a really
Speaker 1: interesting TED talk by UM, a guy who designs press
Speaker 1: the season. His name was I think I'm pronouncing this
Speaker 1: right as Todd Kaikin, and he was talking about a
Speaker 1: process called targeted muscle reinnervation. And if I understand correctly.
Speaker 1: The way this works is they can essentially simulate that
Speaker 1: direct connection between the brain and the movement of the
Speaker 1: Pross thesis and uh, it works like this. So you've
Speaker 1: got a mechanical arm that has you know, a certain
Speaker 1: number of degrees of freedom and actions that can do
Speaker 1: like say, you know, move the forearm up and down
Speaker 1: by bending at the elbow, or pinch by moving the
Speaker 1: you know, the muscles in the arm, in the hand,
Speaker 1: um and in us. All of these things are controlled
Speaker 1: by nerve impulses through you know, nerves that go down
Speaker 1: the arm. Now, they can't connect those nerves directly to
Speaker 1: a machine yet they don't know how to do it.
Speaker 1: We just haven't figured that out. The way to get
Speaker 1: the nerves of to send the signal directly to a
Speaker 1: machine to make it do the job essentially to build
Speaker 1: a new pathway for the ones that were lost or
Speaker 1: maybe we're never there, right, But they can reroute it mechanically.
Speaker 1: And what he showed is that they would perform a
Speaker 1: surgery where they would take these nerves out of the
Speaker 1: arm and they'd reroute them to a muscle that's not used,
Speaker 1: much like they would near the top of the pectoral muscle,
Speaker 1: and each of these nerves would lead to a small
Speaker 1: patch of muscle up in the upper pectoral. And so
Speaker 1: when the person sends that that thought that the command
Speaker 1: that that we used. You know, when you have an
Speaker 1: uninjured arm or a regular arm um to pinch, that
Speaker 1: sends a muscle command and it would make the muscle
Speaker 1: in this case the upper pectoral where the nerve has
Speaker 1: been routed, contract. Now they can teach the machine, based
Speaker 1: on sensors attack match to that muscle to learn how
Speaker 1: to do those commands. So essentially, by creating a mechanical
Speaker 1: detour for the signal to follow, you can create direct
Speaker 1: brain to pros thesis communication. So the person with this
Speaker 1: arm really thinks pinch, and the arm pinches. So almost
Speaker 1: instead of teaching the person how to rethink the process,
Speaker 1: they're teaching the machine how to rethink the process, how
Speaker 1: el the machine how to interpret those those muscle contractions.
Speaker 1: That essentially, when this part of the muscle contracts, that
Speaker 1: means rotate the wrist, that kind of thing, Because that's
Speaker 1: what that's the actual command that's coming from the brain. Uh,
Speaker 1: it's really fascinating and and that's that's a it's a
Speaker 1: huge it's a huge leap ahead, and it's an amazing
Speaker 1: development and it's very promising. Uh. And I imagine that
Speaker 1: the next step would have be the direct brain interface,
Speaker 1: where we don't even have that um that that little
Speaker 1: mechanical stop over, stop over sure. Right now, there's a
Speaker 1: problem with real estate, right You've you've only got so
Speaker 1: much muscle on your body that you can use to
Speaker 1: amplify these nerve signals, and by doing that, you're taking
Speaker 1: up muscles that really should be used for other things.
Speaker 1: Right yeah, Yeah, there are only a few muscles that
Speaker 1: we would not think of as being really necessary for
Speaker 1: uh day to day life. You know, things that things
Speaker 1: that you you have, but you're not using them all
Speaker 1: the time for some other purpose. Uh. Clearly if it
Speaker 1: were something else that you were using all the time,
Speaker 1: then that would interfere. Like when you were trying to
Speaker 1: actually accomplish one task, it would have a second task
Speaker 1: going on with your robotic limb because it was being
Speaker 1: it was misinterpreting the commands. Um yeah, because again, the
Speaker 1: machine itself doesn't know anything, It doesn't know one command
Speaker 1: from another. It just when it detects that there's this
Speaker 1: this activity going on that's a command for it to
Speaker 1: do something. The machine is not itself, is not intelligent,
Speaker 1: it's just reacting in a very specific way to very
Speaker 1: specific uh input. So yeah, I think the next step
Speaker 1: is the whole brain computer interface, which is going to
Speaker 1: go well beyond just prosthetics or prostheses, I should say,
Speaker 1: Joe corrected me before the show pet Yeah, yeah, it's
Speaker 1: what do you call it? What do you think earlier
Speaker 1: to what do you call it when you have to
Speaker 1: set your clocks back an hour? Anyway, Yeah, it's exciting
Speaker 1: to see this development and uh and very encouraging and
Speaker 1: and I highly recommend if you have not gone online
Speaker 1: and watched that Ted talk or watched some of the
Speaker 1: videos about Dean Cayman's lucarm I recommend watching them. They're
Speaker 1: very inspiring. And it's to see the people who this
Speaker 1: is affecting, that the people who have are are suddenly
Speaker 1: regaining abilities that they might have lost more than a
Speaker 1: decade or two decades ago. And to hear them talk
Speaker 1: about that experien variants is really a phenomenal thing. And
Speaker 1: and a lot of the people who are working on this,
Speaker 1: on this medical technology, they credit the fact that you know,
Speaker 1: you're actually seeing lives change because of what you do,
Speaker 1: and that's why they're doing it. It's not because there's
Speaker 1: some sort of lucrative contract involved. It's all about when
Speaker 1: you see someone's life change in that that huge away,
Speaker 1: and that they are suddenly much more self reliant because
Speaker 1: of it. That's phenomenal. You know, it's a great story
Speaker 1: and those are very inspiring videos. I highly recommend checking
Speaker 1: them out. So I have a question for you. Sure,
Speaker 1: imagining that this trend is going to continue like most
Speaker 1: technological trends do, Um, how far away do you think
Speaker 1: we are from a time when you can create a
Speaker 1: prosthetic arm that's virtually indistinguishable from the arm you're born with. Well,
Speaker 1: right now, we can already create limbs that give some
Speaker 1: form of force feedback, although usually that's to let us.
Speaker 1: Usually that ends up being something like a little vibrating motor,
Speaker 1: and the more it vibrates, the harder you are gripping something.
Speaker 1: So right now, that's you know, kind of an artificial
Speaker 1: way of determining how hard you're gripping it. I would
Speaker 1: say that this is so much fun because whenever you're
Speaker 1: talking about future technologies, it's always safe to go with
Speaker 1: we're twenty years away, because we're always twenty years away.
Speaker 1: It depends on the technology. Either you're always twenty years
Speaker 1: away or you're always a decade out away away. I
Speaker 1: feel yeah, but but seriously, I mean, we're the complex
Speaker 1: nature of creating a brain computer interface that is seamless
Speaker 1: is you can't It's impossible for me to overstate how
Speaker 1: complicated that is because we we honestly, we don't understand
Speaker 1: everything about the brain. So until we have a true
Speaker 1: understanding of the brain, it's very difficult to create an
Speaker 1: interface that's going to work, especially yeah, especially across a population. Right,
Speaker 1: you have to build them almost from the ground up
Speaker 1: on an individual basis, because we don't have enough of
Speaker 1: an understanding to approach it from a more general standpoint.
Speaker 1: So final answer, twenty years, Laura, I'm gonna I will
Speaker 1: while we're making up numbers, I'm gonna say fifty fifty years. Definitely.
Speaker 1: Lauren's a pessimist, Joe, I have no idea. Why do
Speaker 1: you ask a question because you just wanted to know
Speaker 1: because you'll are smarter than me. Okay, well that's fair.
Speaker 1: I do not think that's true. Don't come in so yeah, No,
Speaker 1: I'm kidding Joe. Joe's a very bright guy. Uh, almost
Speaker 1: human level intelligence. So but anyway, no, no, this this
Speaker 1: is a really interesting topic and it's one of those
Speaker 1: where I think when you see the benefits of the technology,
Speaker 1: it's I can't imagine not being inspired by it. I
Speaker 1: find it, you know, in an incredible story. So I'm
Speaker 1: really eager to see this continue in the future. Uh.
Speaker 1: And meanwhile, we want to know what you guys think
Speaker 1: about the future, what's your what excites you about the future,
Speaker 1: And we want this to really be a conversation sation,
Speaker 1: So go to f w thinking dot com be part
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Speaker 1: to have this conversation where you find out what makes
Speaker 1: you excited about the future. Let us know and we
Speaker 1: will talk to you again really soon. For more on
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