Hussain Irfan, Santarnecchi Emiliano, Leo Andrea, Ricciardi Emiliano, Rossi Simone, Prattichizzo Domenico
IEEE Int Conf Rehabil Robot. 2017 Jul;2017:1177-1182. doi: 10.1109/ICORR.2017.8009409.
The Supernumerary robotic limbs are a recently introduced class of wearable robots that, differently from traditional prostheses and exoskeletons, aim at adding extra effectors (i.e., arms, legs, or fingers) to the human user, rather than substituting or enhancing the natural ones. However, it is still undefined whether the use of supernumerary robotic limbs could specifically lead to neural modifications in brain dynamics. The illusion of owning the part of body has been already proven in many experimental observations, such as those relying on multisensory integration (e.g., rubber hand illusion), prosthesis and even on virtual reality. In this paper we present a description of a novel magnetic compatible supernumerary robotic finger together with preliminary observations from two functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) experiments, in which brain activity was measured before and after a period of training with the robotic device, and during the use of the novel MRI-compatible version of the supernumerary robotic finger. Results showed that the usage of the MR-compatible robotic finger is safe and does not produce artifacts on MRI images. Moreover, the training with the supernumerary robotic finger recruits a network of motor-related cortical regions (i.e. primary and supplementary motor areas), hence the same motor network of a fully physiological voluntary motor gestures.
额外的机器人肢体是最近引入的一类可穿戴机器人，与传统假肢和外骨骼不同，其目的是为人类用户增加额外的效应器（即手臂、腿或手指），而不是替代或增强自然的肢体。然而，使用额外的机器人肢体是否会特别导致大脑动力学的神经改变仍不明确。在许多实验观察中已经证明了拥有身体部位的错觉，比如那些依赖多感官整合的实验（如橡胶手错觉）、假肢实验甚至虚拟现实实验。在本文中，我们描述了一种新型的磁兼容额外机器人手指，并给出了来自两个功能磁共振成像（fMRI）实验的初步观察结果。在这两个实验中，在使用机器人设备进行一段时间训练之前和之后，以及在使用新型磁共振兼容版本的额外机器人手指期间，测量了大脑活动。结果表明，使用磁共振兼容的机器人手指是安全的，并且不会在磁共振图像上产生伪影。此外，使用额外机器人手指进行训练会激活一个与运动相关的皮质区域网络（即初级和辅助运动区），因此与完全生理性的自主运动手势具有相同的运动网络。
