🦾 Japanese Scientists Created a Biohybrid Robotic Hand
Engineers from the University of Tokyo have built a robotic hand with tendonlike human muscle tissue.
Using a 3D-printed plastic base, they developed an 18 cm long hand, using thin strings of lab-grown muscle tissue bundled into sushi-like rolls to give the fingers enough strength to contract.
The muscles contract through electrical stimulation, mimicking nerve impulses. The biohybrid hand can gesticulate, grab, and move objects like pipettes.
However, the key advantage is the hand's ability to bend each finger individually and at multiple points. For example, the hand can do a "scissor" gesture ⤴️
While this gesture is very simple for a normal human hand, oddly enough, it's quite difficult for even the most advanced bionic prostheses because they rarely control fingers independently.
After about 10 minutes of use, the hand shows signs of fatigue, yet it recovers within just one hour of rest. "Observing such a recovery response, similar to that of living tissues, in engineered muscle tissues was a remarkable and fascinating outcome," noted professor Shoji Takeuchi from the University of Tokyo,
Japanese scientists have been conducting such experiments for about 10 years. But so far, biohybrid devices have been much smaller (about 1 cm) and have less mobility.
Such technology has the potential to advance biohybrid prosthetics. It could also aid drug testing, help develop new surgical techniques, and better understand how muscle tissues work in complex systems.
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