Student working to create a robotic prosthetic arm

Shaikha Al Suwaidi, a final-year student at Khalifa University, is creating an arm which will use sensory signals from the body.

ABU DHABI // Shaikha Al Suwaidi, a final-year student at Khalifa University, is creating a prosthetic arm that will use sensory signals from the body’s muscles and allow an amputee to use the device like a human hand.

The Emirati found her love of robotics when she was an intern at the Marie Curie Robotics Institute at the University of Paris Marie Curie in 2012. She said her attendance at the programme was “a turning point in my life”.

When she returned to Khalifa University at the end of the summer, the schools robotics laboratory had opened and she found her career path.

“We want to combine the nervous system into being linked with a medical device, which would be the robotic platform,” she said. “This could be helpful for people like ex-military, people who lost limbs through car accidents or even diabetes. There’s nothing like this here in the UAE so people have to travel abroad for such technology.”

The signals from the local muscles will be sent to the hand via a mapping system and the hand is then controlled through the memory of those signals.

Ms Al Suwaidi is beginning with a simple grasping movement. Even this is complex, however, teaching the device to sense texture and learn how tightly to grip certain things. For example, the device must be programmed not to crush a drinking glass.

Dr Kinda Khalaf, the department head, said the device would store a database of signals that the robot would learn, but it would be customised to the user, each individual using different signals.

“It will be individual-dependent and also will vary on their level of dysfunction,” she said.

Eventually, Ms Al Suwaidi will develop the project to make it receptive to neurosensory reception and make the device responsive to heat.

“One of the biggest challenges is that when the body is moving, it’s all working together, but with the device, it has to constantly be syncing to the body,” she said. “We’ll never be able to mimic the human body entirely. We also ethically try to stop at some point. We cannot be God.”