Phantom Neuro develops a muscle interface with which individuals – Especially those with limb loss or motor limitations – To arrange advanced robot systems such as prostheses and exoskelettes intuitively using the natural electrical signals generated by their muscles.
Connor Glass, founder and CEO of Phantom Neuro, spoke with MobiHealthNews About the technology of the company for amputants and the potential for robot -like limbs to exceed the capacities of the human body in one day.
MobiHealthNews: What is the technology of Phantom Neuro?
Connor Glass: Phantom Neuro, at the end of the day, when I had to describe it, is a control company, both metaphorically and literally. So we try to make people’s lives better by giving them better control over their lives, and in particular people who have a little control lost by a kind of injury or handicap who renounced control and perhaps even even surpassed what they were for.
The way we do that is by literally making control possible through this emerging paradigm of robot systems, mainly.
So there are incredible robot systems that build other people – humanoid robots, prosthetic limbs, wheelchairs, exoskeletons, surgical robots, all these things. But the problem that exists is that patients and individuals who cannot use systems useful to record their true intended usefulness.
So although a robot is able to move every individual finger and to rotate its wrist and do really complicated things, a user has no way to control that functionality, and so what could be an incredible robot could be banned to a very simplistic device that does not justify a really high price tag.
Phantom is about bridging that gap between robot systems that arise and the future of those systems, and the ability of a person to capture that functionality within the robot and therefore make control possible so that they can regain their functionality.
And then of course there are applications for this technology outside of only an injured condition and giving someone control over a robot-like limb or an exoskeleton to recreate someone’s function, but also by making these robot systems function more as people, or semi-autonomous or autonomous, where you can like the robotic layer as a training seizure.
So you take human movement data and place it in a robot to tell a robot how you can move like a person. The best way to train a robot to do something like a person is to undertake data related to a person who does that action and then teach the robot to do that. And so we try to make really complicated robots function as people.
MHN: What you offer is a muscle machine interface, right? How does a muscle-machine interface differ from an interface from the brain computer?
Glass: There are two important facets for that. The first is, how is it technically different? It is therefore technically different because we absorb electrical activity from the muscle instead of capturing that electrical activity from neural tissues such as the brain or spinal cord or nerves.
Most people do not know that the muscles actually generate electricity when they do what they have to do, just like the brain or spinal cord or nerves. And you can find patterns in that electricity in the same way as you can in a brain to do the same.
So at the end of the day, whether it is a muscle machine, nerve machine, brain-machine interface, you will find electrical data from the body, you will find patterns in that data and use those patterns to do interesting things in principle.
We have chosen to concentrate on muscles such as our source of electrical activity, especially for this purpose of control, because how people control the world around them? It’s with their limbs. Their limbs are powered by muscles. We actually do not use the power to control the world around us directly. We use muscles that bend and extend to move our limbs, and that is how we are naturally set up to interact with our environment, which means that the use of electricity from muscles to control things is the most natural way that a person can manage wireless robot -like systems because our body is designed to function.
There are also technical differences between muscles and the brain. So the muscle, for example, the signals are much larger than the signals that come from the brain. So one of the challenges in the brain is, how do you get these really teeny, small signals in a reliable way to use them?
So in the brain they are Teeny, small, and there is a lot of noise in it and it is very chaotic, which makes it a very difficult problem. Sense signals are almost 1000 times larger in Amplitude. So much of how all these systems work is determined by how large and clean the signals that you detect are. The larger and cleaner they are, which translates into signal-noise ratio, the easier they can be used in a certain scenario.
With our signals they are quite large. There are much less and they are easier to detect. And so it is still a very challenging problem, but it is easier than trying to do the same task directly from the brain. So that’s the first part.
The second part is everything else except the technology. One thing that many people don’t think about in my opinion is everything else that belongs to the technology to make it successful. So you can have the world’s greatest technology, but if you need a specialized surgeon, general anesthesia, a long -term stay in the hospital, hundreds of thousands of dollars to pay for it, continuity of care that is specialized, a functional MRI for everything that can be received for each patient that can be fully received.
For us, because our technology is implanted just below the skin and a remaining limb, that is an outpatient procedure. You do not need a specialized surgeon. There are more than 70,000 surgeons who can do it compared to neurosurgeons, where are a handful of thousands who can do it. You do not need general anesthesia.
It can therefore be done for a price that is much more accessible for patients … not hundreds of thousands of dollars, but more like tens of thousands of dollars, which is much tastier from a payer perspective.
MHN: Do you think that robot -like prostheses can be superior to a human arm?
Glass: Absolute. I think that. As they stand today, they are not because they are heavier. They require a lot of battery power, which has many problems that are connected to it. Some of them, theoretical or in practice, have all the different movements available for them with all these engines, but all these problems are with that.
But we are in the early children’s shoes of these robot systems that are being developed. Now, in order to be an incentive for these robot systems, for these robot -like systems, to approach or surpass the true human function, there must be a financial stimulus, which means that they really, really have to work well for people and income for people for people to be willing to be willing to make them better and stronger.
And our system is an example of a system with which they can have the financial incentive to make the robots better, faster and stronger.
Now, the natural future, and the not so distant future in my opinion, is that these robot -like limbs are better than human limbs and they are replaceable. So if something goes wrong, you can replace it or change your needs over time. Let’s say that you start as a special forces and you want a robot -like leg that still enables you to work in the field and do it all, but when you get older, perhaps once you are an older person, you want one that is much better to stabilize you and do all these different things that are more just quality of life.
So you can change what the appendices actually do over time. And then you can also imagine a crazy world where you can have different attachments for these appendices.
Let’s say you are a handyman and that you have lost your upper limb in an accident in the workplace in a machine or whatever it can be. Ultimately, you will be able to have a robot -like limb in the very short term, where you can have different attachments with which you can do your work better than you could do differently when you were limited by only this form factor. It is a wild thing to think about, but all that technology is there and exists. It’s just how you control it and make it useful.
MHN: The device has been tested for a pig, correct?
Glass: We have tested the device on two pigs at the moment, which was really interesting. So, the first pig we did, we implanted the very first way back when versions of the system in the intact leg, on top of the muscles in the leg, and then we trained the pig to walk on a treadmill. And we had a Virtual Reality robot leg that in fact mimics the pig bone control that actually imitated what the intact leg did, purely on the basis of the electricity that came from the muscles. And that is in the same way that a person controls a prosthesis or an exoskeleton. And so that was our first proof of concept.
And then we recently did another animal where we have implanted the final system that we will soon implant with people to do a kind of last system control – to ensure that everything works in a living being and that all software systems and the wireless communication and the robustness of the device and that everything is according to plan. It all went extremely well.
MHN: Have you already started clinical tasting of people?
Glass: We have not yet started with implantable clinical tests. Technically, we have done some clinical tests of the surface under the approval of the IRB, but we implant people in Australia for the first time this year.
So by the end of this year we will implant a cohort of the upper limbs amputants in Australia to control several different commercial robot -like prosthetic limbs available.
MHN: You said that many other devices are very heavy. What is your device made of?
Glass: Our device is extremely lightweight. We have designed this system to be as safe as possible and human as possible and to have as much known as human as possible.
So there are people who work on all these new materials and really thin film arrays and things like that. We chose not to go on that path because we didn’t have to go that path, and because that introduces many questions from the FDA about: “Is this safe? Will it take a long time?”
We wanted to use technologies that have been used in people for a long time. So we have an electrode array with platinum electrodes, which are the standard in the field based on silicone.
So, just like a normal silicone array, similar to panelarrays of the spinal cord, similar to breast implants, similar to any implant that essentially has a silicon derivative. We have an electronic housing made of titanium, which is the standard within implantable medical devices. We have some gold there, many noble metals, but it is all the standard materials that have already been used in medical implants for literally decades with great success that are known to be very safe.
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