A robotic extra thumb can be controlled well enough by some people to be used while playing piano.
Since 2015, at Imperial College London and his colleagues have been developing a robotic 鈥渢hird thumb鈥� that straps to a user鈥檚 hand next to the little finger. The thumb is controlled by the wearer via electrical signals from wiggling their foot.
The researchers have now begun testing the device to see if it is helpful for activities that require fine motor skills 鈥� including playing the piano.
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鈥淚t鈥檚 important to show this technology works with fine motor skills because it shows that you鈥檙e actually controlling the movement and not just sort of jerking it around,鈥� says Faisal.
In particular, the researchers wanted to determine if they could predict which people are most likely to find the thumb easy to use, and how quickly they would learn to use it.
In order to explore whether familiarity with a skill makes a difference, the team tested the thumb on six experienced pianists and six people who didn鈥檛 play piano.
They first put the subjects through a battery of tests to examine their general timing and dexterity skills. They then asked them to play a series of simple piano pieces on an electric keyboard.
The team found that, regardless of piano experience, the subjects were all able to play the keyboard using the thumb within an hour. How effectively they did so was predicted by their dexterity level and timing skills rather than by their prior experience of piano playing.
This finding means we aren鈥檛 limited to using an extra robotic digit only in tasks we are already familiar with, says Faisal. Instead, we can all learn to use an extra digit to perform new and unfamiliar tasks.
The results echo those obtained by another research team that were published earlier this year. That work found that wearers of a robotic third thumb could use the extra digit to cradle a cup of coffee or flick through the pages of a book.
Faisal and his colleagues are now working on a prototype that could give humans a whole extra hand.
鈥淪upernumerary robots [meaning those that provide extra digits, extra hands, and so on] are a cutting-edge technology which has already demonstrated its great capability in assisting people with physical limitations,鈥� says Virginia Ruiz Garate at the University of the West of England, Bristol. 鈥淭his robot shows how this human augmentation can reach even further, making its way into cultural and broader domains of daily life.鈥�
Reference: bioRxiv,
