The Real Cyborg

Below is a screenshot of Claudia Mitchell. She lost her left arm in a motorcycle accident in 2004. Years later, she became the first human being to have a functional prosthetic limb, that she controls with her mind. She was a 3 Million dollar project from Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago. And their goal was to give her a robotic arm that could do everything a normal one could.



"How does it work? Mitchell's arm is "myoelectric," which means it picks up electrical signals coming straight from her brain, down her nerves. Electrodes help the signals jump from her body, to the prosthesis, which uses a computer to figure out which motion Mitchell is thinking about." -io9



"Surgeons made this process easier by routing many of the nerves from Mitchell's arm to her chest. While there are some weird results of this process - for example, when she showers, Mitchell can feel the water hitting a phantom "arm" when it hits her chest. There are several spots all over her chest muscles that, when touched, trigger feelings like "that's my elbow" or "that's my hand." When she identifies those, researchers attach electrodes to those spots and program the computer in her arm to recognize signals from them as "elbow" or "hand" signals. This gives her fairly granular control over the arm."-continued from io9

There are several companies (like darpa) that are coming up with different sorts of robotic mind controlled prosthetics. Some have even gone as far as developing robotic hands that can FEEL!