Human movement augmentation and how to make it a reality
This foundational work addresses the problem of enabling superhuman capabilities for medical and industrial applications, though it is incremental as it builds on existing advances.
The paper tackles the challenge of augmenting human movement with artificial limbs by constructing a taxonomy and analyzing key features like control signals and sensory feedback, proposing a vision for the field without providing concrete numerical results.
Augmenting the body with artificial limbs controlled concurrently to the natural limbs has long appeared in science fiction, but recent technological and neuroscientific advances have begun to make this vision possible. By allowing individuals to achieve otherwise impossible actions, this movement augmentation could revolutionize medical and industrial applications and profoundly change the way humans interact with their environment. Here, we construct a movement augmentation taxonomy through what is augmented and how it is achieved. With this framework, we analyze augmentation that extends the number of degrees-of-freedom, discuss critical features of effective augmentation such as physiological control signals, sensory feedback and learning, and propose a vision for the field.