- Person
- Norbert Wiener
- Lived
- 1894–1964
- Field
- Mathematics, cybernetics
- From
- American
The story
Norbert Wiener, the son of the Jewish scholar Leo Wiener, spent his career at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and founded cybernetics, the study of feedback and control in machines and living things. One of his central ideas was that a person and a machine can form a single loop, in which signals flow back and forth to guide action. As early as the 1950s he had suggested that biological signals might control an artificial limb, but the idea was not taken up in the United States.
In the early 1960s Wiener broke his hip. While he recovered, he talked with his surgeon, Melvin Glimcher, about how servomechanisms, the self-correcting motors of control engineering, might link the body to a prosthesis. Glimcher already had a practical interest: he spent one day a week at Liberty Mutual's rehabilitation centre in Boston treating workers who had lost limbs in industrial accidents, and he had noticed that people who had lost an arm above the elbow got far less use from their prostheses than those who still had the joint.
Wiener suggested that two MIT professors, the electrical engineer Amar Bose and the mechanical engineer Robert Mann, join the group, and they recruited graduate students to work on the signal processing and hardware. The project brought together MIT, Harvard, Massachusetts General Hospital and Liberty Mutual, which hoped a better arm would help injured workers return to their jobs. In 1968 the team demonstrated the Boston Elbow. Electrodes taped to the skin picked up faint electrical signals from the biceps or triceps muscle in the wearer's remaining limb, amplified them and sent them to a motor that moved the artificial elbow.
It was one of the first artificial limbs controlled by the user's own muscle signals. Research on its control systems by Mann's student Stephen Jacobsen became the basis of the Utah Arm, and descendants of the Boston Arm are still made today. Wiener did not live to see it; he died in 1964.
Why it matters
Myoelectric prostheses, which let amputees move artificial limbs with signals from their own muscles, grew partly from the Boston Arm project that Wiener's suggestion set in motion.
About Norbert Wiener
Child prodigy turned MIT mathematician who founded cybernetics, the science of feedback and control, and was among the first to warn that automation and thinking machines must serve human beings.
More about Norbert Wiener
Sources
- The Boston Arm: An Early Myoelectric Prosthesis IEEE Spectrum
- The Art of Motion Harvard Medicine magazine
- Norbert Wiener Wikipedia
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.