An amputation changes life irretrievably. A lot of things that were previously routine have to be relearned. Hands and arms are key organs for independent interaction with our environment. Over the centuries, people have tried various strategies to reduce the burden of amputation in a person’s life. The most important aids are mechanical or mechatronic devices that partially or completely replace the function of the missing limb and are known as “prostheses”. “Prosthetic devices can be completely passive, body-powered or externally powered (e.g. by a battery). The most advanced prostheses are controlled by neural signals that are collected from the patient’s body and translated into control commands for the prosthetic device,” explains Urs Schneider, Scientific Director for Health and Bioproduction Technology at the Fraunhofer Institute for Production Engineering and Automation IPA.

Controlling prostheses with your thoughts

When a person or animal intends to move, their central nervous system sends weak electromagnetic pulses to motor neurons, which in turn activate muscle fibers. A single motor neuron can be connected to thousands of muscle fibers, which act as a natural amplifier of the neural signal. In order to record and interpret these electromagnetic signals from the muscles, electrodes are often used to control a prosthesis, for example.

When a person performs a specific movement, such as closing their hand into a fist, muscle activation produces a characteristic pattern of electrical signals. These signals can be classified, stored and used to determine the behavior of electromechanical actuators in a mechatronic device. Despite subtle differences in signal strength and distribution, both actual movements and imitated movements without limbs result in coherent activation patterns. This allows human-machine interfaces to create a virtual dictionary of activation patterns for desired actions.

The core of the new quantum sensor is a tiny diamond cube with a side length of half a millimeter. Unlike a natural diamond, which consists of pure carbon, this crystal contains individual nitrogen atoms (chemical abbreviation N) and vacancies in the lattice (English Vacancy, abbreviated V). These NV centers can be excited to fluoresce using a laser. Using additional microwave radiation, they can be brought into a state in which a change in the external magnetic field leads to a change in the emitted fluorescent radiation. This can be recorded precisely and thus enables the smallest changes in the magnetic field to be determined.

“Our cooperation with Fraunhofer IPA accelerates the transfer of this technology from our development center into clinical practice, because with this NV sensor we are able to detect the weak neuronal impulses in the muscle without contact and with high local resolution,” explains Michael Förtsch, CEO at Q.ANT. With the quantum technology know-how from Q.ANT and the biomechatronics expertise from Fraunhofer IPA, the first prosthetic sensor module is currently being developed. Fraunhofer IPA will be showing a demonstrator for this at the COMPAMED trade fair in Düsseldorf in November.