Technology around prosthetic limbs is getting more sophisticated and a conference happening in Waterloo region on Friday and Saturday will talk about the future of the industry.
The conference will also discuss new innovations like doctors exploring the potential of tying nerves directly into machine prosthetics.
The conference was organized by Doug Dittmer from the Ontario Association for Amputee Care. Dittmer is also the chief of rehab at the Freeport campus of Grand River Hospital.
He joined CBC Kitchener-Waterloo’s The Morning Edition Friday ahead of the conference.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Host Craig Norris: So explain for us what are we talking about here exactly when it comes to the future of prosthetics?
Doug Dittmer: We’re having this conference named Innovations in Prosthetic Care and basically over the years, we’ve had all types of prostheses that are body powered or myo-electric systems where the neural control hasn’t been that good. The dexterity of the hand is not as good as you want in these upper extremity prostheses.
What we’ve done is we’ve got together some of the best engineers in Canada and from Michigan to come to this conference to speak about some of the advances that may allow us to have much more dexterity with these types of prostheses.
Norris: How are these discussions around robotics and prosthetics different from what we already have?
Dittmer: The morning session is on upper extremities. Right now they’re fairly clumsy. The body-powered ones only allow us to obtain so many ranges of motion with the hand and your strength is limited.
But if you can think back, perhaps for those that are old enough to the 1970s, there was a TV series called The Six Million Dollar Man and in that an injured astronaut was basically rebuilt into a cyborg.
So here I am within my own lifetime, 50 years later saying, can we actually do that? Are we able to hook up with the brain-machine interface? Are we able to hook nerves directly into a machine to give us much more control and much more like a natural human movement?
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Norris: Do you think we can?
Dittmer: What we’re looking at this conference, Dr. Jon Sensinger from New Brunswick, who runs the Advanced Prosthetics Lab there, is very close on the motor side of doing some of these things with some pattern recognition models that he’s developed.
We have Alex Vasco [co-founder and chief technology officer at prosthetic rehabilitation company Blue Arbor Technologies] coming up from Michigan to talk to us about the sensory side. In other words, can you actually feel using a hand that has particular sensors on it that are directly wired into your electrical system?
We’re not there yet, but we’re getting very close.
Norris: What are some of the ethical considerations around this tech?
Dittmer: Well, if you recently watched the Oppenheimer movie, the scientists and engineers started out
thinking that they were doing a good thing, creating the atomic energy and then sometimes it can go sideways.
If you are actually able to create a cyborg that has greater strength, can run faster and jump higher, we really need to think about that. For that reason, we’ve asked the professor Gus Skorburg from the University of Guelph, who heads up the ethics group there, to come and talk to us.
One of the presentations we’re going to have a panel up there and Gus is going to ask them, should you be doing this? I was talking to Alex Vasco the other day and he said, “When I come to these conferences, it’s usually technical”. And I said, “No, no professor Skorburg is going to ask you about the ethical side.”
He said, “I really got to think about that.” So we’re we’re exploring it. We don’t have all the answers yet.
Norris: What is your experience with cyborg tech at Freeport right now?
Dittmer: Well, at Freeport, we’re not there yet. We’re still using the modern day things, but I’m part of the faculty at the University of Waterloo and adjunct professor there, and we have talked about building these mechanical hands.
I’ve talked to the plastic surgeons about the possibilities of connecting this. So we’re still very much in the early stages, particularly at Freeport.
We’re not as far advanced as they are in Michigan or at the University of New Brunswick. That’s why we’re bringing them here to say, “How can we work collaboratively together to advance our knowledge in this?”
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Norris: On a personal level, for you working in this area of medicine, how do you feel about these potential advancements in prosthetics?
Dittmer: It’s wildly exciting. Having watched that show back in the 70s and thinking, “You know, that’ll never happen” and now to actually think that this is something that can happen.
The advances in AI to allow the engineers to build the algorithms that we need to make these more controls, these neuroprosthetic control units work better. That is just mind blowing.
I mean, whenever I go to some of the founders meetings at the university or at Communitech, it’s very, very — it’s mind blowing. My wife often says to me when I call her after those, “You sound like a kid in a candy shop.”
It’s been great to work in the Waterloo region and be affiliated with our great engineers up at the university for sure.
Norris: How long do you think it will be until we see cyborg prosthetics being used, or at least on the market?
Dittmer: Some prototypes are out there now in Europe. Dr. Sensinger is having a conference in August in Fredericton, where he’s bringing scientists from around the world with that.
I think the early prototypes are starting to come out, not so much in Canada yet, but they are coming out in other places of the world.
I’m not an engineer and I am not aware of the technical difficulties with this, but I would say in possibly 10 to 15 years we’ll start to see some workable prototypes for this.
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