• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

Smooth Walking Isn’t Easy, But This State-Of-The-Art Bionic Ankle Can Do It

July 11, 2024 by Deborah Bloomfield

A new robotic ankle controlled by electrical signals in residual muscles below the knee is showing promise in improved mobility and reduced pain. After just two practice sessions, around six hours in total, seven participants in a clinical trial testing the new device were able to walk as fast as non-amputees and the movements of their bionic joint mimicked natural ankle movements. 

Advertisement



Walking is easy, when you don’t have to think about it. In reality, controlling an action seemingly as simple as walking is not just a question of contracting the right muscles. It is a complex choreography of control and feedback. 

When you decide to take a step, your brain sends signals down your spinal cord and into your legs, telling the muscles to contract, bending your joints. The movement and position of each joint is controlled by the contrasting action of two types of muscles: agonists and antagonists.  

Think about your arm. When you flex your elbow, your biceps acts as the agonist contracting and bringing your forearm closer to your upper arm. At the same time, your triceps (on the other side of the arm), the antagonist in this movement, is relaxing and allowing the movement to happen. Conversely, when you stretch your arm, your triceps acts as the agonist pulling the forearm away and the biceps is the antagonist relaxing its pull. 

By reading out the tension in both the biceps and the triceps your brain can figure out at what angle your elbow is bent. The ability to perceive this tension is called proprioception: the perception of yourself (proprio in Latin). This then informs your motor system. 

Advertisement

When you contract your leg muscles to walk, you bend the joints in your hip, knee, and ankle. The position of each of these joints at the start and end of the step, and the resistance each movement might meet, is different when you walk in all types of situations (dodgy terrains, slopes, sticky mud). This makes it impossible for the brain to just send a one-size-fits-all “walk” command.  

Walking is a lot to think about 

Leg amputees have lost a lot of their muscles, and both the nerves that control muscle contraction as well as the proprioceptive ones that send feedback about how the movement is going. Developments in prosthetic limbs are trying to restore the full orchestra of commands and feedback.  

In early prosthetics, patients could control their limb with a body-powered harness: e.g. they would learn to move their shoulder to control their prosthetic hand. Then, more sophisticated prostheses came along that used electrical signals in the muscles of the upper leg to steer ankle joint movements. 

Until now, feedback signals were not being utilized, resulting in movements that were less flexible and unable to adapt to a changing environment.  

Advertisement

A new type of leg prosthesis is now promising smoother walking: the agonist-antagonist myoneural interface (AMI). That’s a mouthful. The AMI restores proprioceptive signaling by reconnecting the agonist and antagonist muscles. The brain and the device can then read out the complementary tension in the two muscles, the same way we do with our biceps and triceps. 

The first prosthetic of this type is a bionic ankle for people with amputations below the knee where the muscles of the shin and the calf can be reattached. Because the agonist and antagonist are connected again, the bending of the joints can be read out by the opposing tension in the two muscles. This tension adapts to various situations, like inclined terrain and stairs.  

A decoder in the prosthesis can dynamically adjust the ankle flexion, the way that an intact limb would. The range of ankle movements in the prosthesis during walking was strikingly similar to that of non-amputees. 



Advertisement

So, what’s next for prosthetic legs? Osseoperception. The authors point to research that shows improved integration of prosthetics when they are anchored to the bone (ossum in Latin). Bionic limbs are getting closer and closer not only to moving like a biological limb, but to feeling like one too. 

The study is published in Nature Medicine.

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. ‘Incredible fear’ among women across Afghanistan -U.N. official
  2. Stocks find fleeting relief in Evergrande deal; Fed looms
  3. Brokerage Robinhood introduces 24/7 phone support after communications criticisms
  4. Flowery Funerals? The Controversial Neanderthal Found In An Iraqi Cave

Source Link: Smooth Walking Isn't Easy, But This State-Of-The-Art Bionic Ankle Can Do It

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • Did You Know The World’s Largest Waterfall Is Underwater?
  • Video Game Study Found Out What People Do When The World Ends, And It’s Exactly What You’d Expect
  • How Do We Predict The Weather? Find Out More In Issue 40 Of CURIOUS – Out Now
  • You Should Never Leave These Foods In Your Fridge Door (But We Bet You Do)
  • These Gullies On Mars Look Carved – We Might Finally Know What Created Them
  • Potential Environmental Trigger For Autism Identified, 3I/ATLAS’s Tail Appears To Have Changed Direction, And Much More This Week
  • Spaghetti Has Inner Secrets We’re Only Just Learning About
  • How Far Back In Time Could You Go And Still Understand English?
  • We Now Know How The First People Reached America – And It Wasn’t On Foot
  • Two Major Coral Species Now Functionally Extinct In Florida Keys, After Record-Breaking Marine Heatwave
  • A “Super-Earth” In The Habitable Zone Is Half The Distance To Comparable Worlds
  • Adorable But Critically Endangered Bornean Orangutan Born In Conservation Success
  • How Did The FDA Settle On The “2,000 Calories Per Day” Guideline?
  • Comet 3I/ATLAS Losing At Least Two Kangaroos’ Worth Of Dust Every Second
  • Mummified Dinosaur Duo Prove They Had Hooves, Marking “The First Confirmed Hooved Reptile”
  • What Do The Numbers On Your Toaster Really Mean?
  • NASA Vs. Elon Musk: Is A Moon Landing This Decade Off The Cards?
  • Scientists Explored Some Of The Deepest Parts Of The Ocean And Spotted Some Seriously Weird Deep-Sea Creatures
  • 500-Meter-Tall Megatsunami Struck Remote Alaskan Fjord After Massive Landslide
  • 3I/ATLAS, CKM Syndrome, And Mosquitoes’ Final Frontier
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version