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GRASP Seminar Series: Spring 2008
April 11, 11:00 a.m., Wu & Chen Auditorium, Levine Hall (3330 Walnut Street)
Ed Colgate
Northwestern University
"Toward Haptic Prostheses for Amputees"
Abstract: For well over a century, advances in upper extremity prosthetics – artificial hands and arms – have been frustratingly slow. Even with the advent of myoelectrically controlled devices in the late twentieth century, many patients continued to prefer cable operated arms and hooks that were essentially Civil War era technology. Among the challenges of developing more functional devices, two that remained intractable were the ability to perform coordinated multi-joint movements, and the ability to regain a sense of touch. Recently however, a surgical method known as Targeted Reinnervation (TRI) developed by Dr. Todd Kuiken has created new promise that both difficulties might be overcome. In TRI, residual nerves from the amputated limb are transferred to intact muscles. The nerves reinnervate both the muscle as well as the overlying skin, creating both efferent and afferent connections to the phantom limb. In this talk, I will give an overview of the TRI technique, and I will describe the development of advanced multi-degree-of-freedom prosthetic limbs as well as haptic prostheses for the restoration of senses such as pressure, vibration/texture, and temperature.
Biography: J. Edward Colgate is the Pentair-Nugent Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Northwestern University. He has worked extensively in the areas of haptic interface and teleoperation, and he is the co-inventor of “cobots,” a class of collaborative robots. Dr. Colgate is the founder of two start-up companies and he is the founding Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Haptics.
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