Artificial Limbs

Dangit! How do they work? One idea I've got is that they are powered by the blood of the person who has them and the nerve endings are connected to various wires. The supporting rods are driven deep into the bones to keep the limb in place. This all sounds incredibly painful, unfortunatell. Anyone have a better suggestion?

Just give 'em batteries for the power source.

Not sure how painful connecting each nerve would be. Depending on how hard your sci-fi is, a wireless transmitter attached to the brain might work.

edited 27th Jan '11 12:17:14 PM by RTaco

You could base your artificial limbs on current prosthetics. This prosthetic is powered by steam [1].

Here's another one [2]. They surgically rerouted nerves in the test subject's arm stump to muscles in his chest. This allows him to move the prosthetic arm by twitching chest muscles.

I'm not sure about actually attaching the limb . . . you probably would have to attach it to the bone somehow, but if the person was unconscious, it doesn't necessarily have to be a painful procedure. I'd imagine there would be some post-op pain though. (Maybe have the arm itself release pain killers into the body . . .?)

^^ and ^: Currently it is possible for people to control machines using only their brain. It doesn't even have to be an implant.

Of course it's not working perfectly atm, but if it's in the future well Sure, Why Not?.

Let's say that most of the arm is artificial with a small stumpy piece of natural limb that it's attached to. Have it so that the nerves are rerouted through the stump into a cone shape, converging on the outermost "point". The cybernetic arm, when attached, is designed so that it has artificial nerves that fuse with the real nerves at the stump and then interface directly with the arm. Hope that didn't sound too confusing.

^ So Auto-mail?

Properly wired neural connections will be less painful than the shadow limb resulting from them being cut. If the supporting structure is integrated into the bones and care is taken to ensure that no nerves are registering pain because of it the limb could feel perfectly natural with sufficient technology. The key here is to be able to control and rewire individual nerves. If that's possible and practical all pain problems are solved by averting and suppressing the undesirable signals but that depends on the tech level. Pyroninja's suggestion seems good but I'd change the nerves to artificial a bit before they converge in the cone (around the supporting synthetic bone) and having something like a super-USB connection there so that the limb can be easily and painlessly swapped around if desired.