• Question: Could artificial limbs improve human body performance?

    Asked by Stephen Hickingbotham to Andrew, Lizzie, Nick, Sonia on 13 Jun 2015.
    • Photo: anon

      anon answered on 13 Jun 2015:

      Currently the best we can hope for with cochlear implants is to help profoundly deaf people hearing to a mild hearing loss.

      But this is rather simplistic since we can hear in the range of 0-120dB range i.e. very very quiet to the sound of a jet engine. With an implant this is reduced to between 40-80dB between the quietest and loudest sounds by the time it reaches the auditory nerve can be as low as 20 electrical ‘units’

      We hear a frequency range of 20Hz to around 20kHz (and higher for younger people), implant give a range at best 70Hz – 8kHz.

      there many other considerations which stop the cochlear implant from working like a normal ear, so its is a considerable challenge to have artificial hearing performing better than what most of us have at the moment.

    • Photo: Andrew Phillips

      Andrew Phillips answered on 14 Jun 2015:

      This is a really interesting question. I think in design we should be aiming to replicate human performance rather than better it. Taking ‘blades’ as used by runners as an example it deepens what you mean by performance. So over short distances (100 and 200m) the amount for effort required to balance and get up to speed on the artificial blade means that the runners using blades are unlikely to be able to run faster than non-disabled runners. However over longer distances (>400m) the bounce offered by the blade may enable runners using blades to run faster than non-disabled runners (although non-disabled runners still have their lower leg muscles to provide power). I can see why the Olympic and Paralympic committees had trouble deciding whether to allow a runner with blades to run at 400m in both games. If we take wheelchair athletes, the time for the wheelchair marathon is much lower than the time for the running marathon. There are new sports being developed that allow disabled and non-disabled athletes to compete together. So it’s an interesting question without a straightforward answer!

    • Photo: Elizabeth Kapasa

      Elizabeth Kapasa answered on 14 Jun 2015:

      They could but we usually aim to replace things in the body to as similar as possible to the original thing. I have read a researcher paper on artificial red blood cells which could be injected to help during emergencies like in the battlefield. So if they were used in a healthy person you could improve their performance. It seems like a dangerous thing though because we don’t know what the long term effects will be so there are also ethical considerations to be made. Is bioenhancement ethically ok? A big question we don’t have answers to yet.

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