U of A lab showcases innovations in prosthetic technologies after first stint at global competition

Local lab researchers have combined brain signals and artificial intelligence to create more responsive prosthetics for amputees.

The University of Alberta's Bionic Limbs for Improved Natural Control (BLINC) Lab showcased the Bento Arm during their first appearance at the Cybathlon, a rehabilitation technology competition, in Switzerland finishing in eighth place.

The Bento Arm is an advanced robotic prosthetic that accurately mimics everyday arm and hand movements using machine learning that recognizes brain signals and muscle patterns.to.

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"When my arm was amputated, all of the nerves that basically went down to my forearm … naturally kind of re-embedded themselves … I can still imagine closing my hand, and what it does is it creates weird little muscle twitches, especially around the scar area," said Chris Neilsen, BLINC's Lab's pilot for the competition.

"It takes advantage of all those random signals and it creates a pattern out of the signal," he added.

According to Patrick Pilarski, a professor at the University of Alberta and a board member for the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute, the technology has been in development for more than a decade and it's available for anyone to use.

"We open source everything we do – all of the hardware, the software, the design files, but the precursors to that arm are, in fact, open source and in use right now all across the globe," Pilarksi told CTV News Edmonton on Tuesday.

"We're able to change how we think about delivering devices people actually want to use and use to live the lives they want to live," Pilarski added.

BLINC Lab has future plans to create the next generation of the Bento Arm by using the findings from the Cybathlon and other research to improve on the technology.

With files from CTV News Edmonton's Nav Sangha