Biomechatronics: Current Stage and Future Advancements

In a previous blog, I discussed prostheses, its history, as well as a case study of retinal prostheses. However, prostheses is a rapidly growing field, with the most recent focus being the incorporation of bionic technology with prosthetics. This field, which integrates mechanical devices with biological organisms, is most commonly known as biomechatronics.

So what exactly are biomechatronics? It is a technology that combines biology, mechanical engineering, and electronics and mechanics to design therapeutic, assistive, and diagnostic devices that have the potential to replace human functions. As a primary goal is to imitate human behavior, a large portion of the analysis is studying human motion. The process is rather complicated.  First, biosensors detect what movement a human intends to do and relays the information to a controller, which interprets the information and delivers it to an actuator. Aside from delivering the received or sent information, controllers are in charge of a biomechatronic device’s movements. Finally, actuators then produce movement and can act to assist the user to move or be an actual replacement of the user’s original muscle or limb.

The possibility of linking contraptions to a human brain is extremely intriguing and has many possibilities. For example, some possibilities are pancreas pacemakers for diabetics, electronic muscle stimulators for stroke and accident survivors, a device that can stimulate damaged muscles and make, a digital camera that can be controlled mentally so blind people can get some sort of vision sensation and a digital microphone that could be implanted in deaf people so they could hear again or for the first time. Furthermore, biomechatronics has more personal capabilities, with ​​a recent group publishing papers on describing how rehabilitation robots can help stroke victims. After a stroke, patients often have trouble moving their arms, and it is known that therapy can help in improving movement. However, this requires much one-on-one time with a therapist, which can be both slow and expensive. If the therapist was assisted by robots and artificial intelligence to study each patient and predict how they should be exercising their arms, then the therapist can treat multiple patients simultaneously, reducing bottlenecks and costs to health care systems.


Although this field holds tremendous promise, biomechatronics are incredibly expensive, limiting its practicality in the present healthcare market. Furthermore, battery technology is insufficient and most biomechatronics lack a neurological connection between the device and the brain. 

Citations

https://www.techopedia.com/definition/14881/biomechatronics

https://researchfeatures.com/biomechatronic-modelling-will-change-the-future/

Image: Left Brain Analytics