Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Connecting the human body to the outside world”.
[, MUSIC PLAYING ], [ CHANTING, ], SHRIYA SRINIVASAN. I’M always amazed by how intricately the body’s mechanisms have evolved, how miniature they are, how energy efficient they are, how precise they are. As a dancer when you go to say like execute a jump or a turn. The fact that you’re able to land where you want precisely with such balance. There are so many different parts of the body that have to work together. To make that happen. Fluidly.
I mean the human body is just engineered, so beautifully., My name is Shriya Srinivasan and I’m a biomedical engineer. Currently a junior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows.. I do research at MIT., I’m also a professional dancer and I’ve been pursuing. The Indian classical art form of Bharatanatyam for the last 22 years. Bharatanatyam is a South Indian, classical art form.. I started learning it from my mother who’s, a very famous Bharatanatyam exponent, who runs a school in Cleveland Ohio., So Bharatanatyam was always around the house along with Carnatic music, which is the classical music form that accompanies it. Since I was probably five. And then when I was in college, I started my own dance, company. And together we’ve been producing new works and have toured around the United States.
[ MUSIC PLAYING ] [ NON-ENGLISH, SINGING ]. It’S a very mime and storytelling-based dance form.. We have these small components called Adavus which form the basic unit of a portion of movement. So just the eyes just the face hand gestures., And we can build these into words and paragraphs and essays and create these very technically challenging pieces of movement that can also convey concepts.. And so we can produce things almost like Broadway musicals and tell an entire story.
Over the course of a production. Earlier this year, I worked on something called flight of the mind for the launch of the Center for Extreme Bionics here at MIT.. That actually was about the development of human movement and then the incidence of pathology or disability both mentally emotionally physically, and how we can use our own courage and our strength and our ability to dig deep to overcome some of these disabilities.. My research is broadly in the space of neural interfacing., And so I work on connecting the human body to the outside world.
In the case of amputation or paralysis, we’re talking about robotic prostheses or exoskeletons., I’m specifically interested in how our mechanoreceptors work and how they allow Us to feel our external world, whether that’s grasping a coffee, mug or feeling with your feet the floor or the ground to be able to balance.. I worked on something called the Agonist-Antagonist Myoneural Interface or the AMI for short.. This is a new surgical technique that can allow patients to regain the ability to feel the external world and feel what their prostheses are feeling.. So after the AMI surgery is done, we’re able to take muscle signals from the limb and use those to control a prosthetic robot, as well as send feedback from the robot about what it’s contacting and how it’s. Moving back to the wearer., The team has developed a variety of methods to get those signals out, one of them being these sensors in the liner. That’S worn here right over the limb., And so we can take the muscle signals from there and then feed those to the robot.
And then, when the robot contacts something or senses a force. For example, it can take that information and send it back to the user by performing stimulation on these electrodes. And the stimulation will then cause one of the muscles to contract, pulling on the other muscle and basically using that natural relationship that we’ve preserved in the limb. To communicate that back to the body in a way that the body already understands., So that sensory feedback mechanism is very natural., He has individual muscle control, which most folks, with an amputation, don’t. SUBJECT. I had probably about a 20-year arc of pain..
I had no mobility in my ankle. Now. My life is great, very productive, very active.. I’Ve gone back to ice climbing., I’m back on my paddleboard., Especially as a carpenter.
I can feel when I’m on a ladder.. I can feel if I’m stepping on a shingle.. I can tell if I’m stepping on the thick end of a shingle, or I can tell if I’m stepping on the thin end of a shingle., And so it’s pretty amazing. SHRIYA SRINIVASAN, So about 40 people today have had these newer types of amputations.. It’S been really a very, very meaningful journey to see that transition in their lives. [, MUSIC PLAYING ], The kind of relief and sense of fulfillment that I get from the arts is very different from what I get from research and science..
I find that research often nourishes my intellectual curiosity and the arts are helping to build that emotional and spiritual growth., But in both worlds I’m thinking about how do we create a sense of feeling? How do we control emotion and your physiological response.? And so that’s really beautiful to me. .