Thalmic Labs ‘Myo’ armband being used to control prosthetic arms

Thalmic Labs is the latest company getting recognition outside of Waterloo Region’s tech hub.

John’s Hopkins University, located in Baltimore, Maryland ordered a few of Thalmic Labs product called the Myo Band.

It is being used to help people move their prosthetic arm, using muscle movements.

The Myo Bands are put above the prosthetic limb, reads electromyography signals, sends them to a computer for analysis via Bluetooth and is sent to the prosthetic arm.

When the patient thinks about moving the prosthetic arm, the arm moves.

The Marketing Director for Thalmic Labs Sameera Banduk tells 570 News how the Myo Band works “It has eight EMG (electromyography) sensors. Those pickup the electrical activity of your muscles when you do different gestures with your hands. For example, when you make a fist or wave left, wave right, each of those have a unique pattern and we’re able to detect that.”

After John’s Hopkins University bought those Myo Bands, they sent a video to Thalmic Labs to show them how the Myo Band is changing the relationship between the user and the prosthetic limb.

Banduk adds how the university can program the product to do what they want it to do. “Developers are able to take the Myo and really make the applications for this technology come to life. They started coding with it before we even realized they were working with it. It was actually back in November, that we saw this for the first time and heard about what they were doing by sharing a video with us. That’s where we learnt about the amazing work they are doing at the John’s Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory.

Banduk tells 570 News how this technology is different than what we have already seen.

“The way that this differs from existing technology is our sensors are very sensitive and it also does not require any skin preparation. In the past you’d need to use conductive gels or actually shave your arm in order to get that really close connection to your skin. The Myo is a consumer device and so you just throw it up on your arm and start using it making it gestures to control different technology.”

When the team learned about what the John’s Hopkins University development team was doing, Banduk says they were blown away.

“We’ve had these ideas on what Myo could be and what the potential of the device could be. This was the first time that we actually saw somebody take our device and use it to actually, potentially better somebody else’s life. That was a really rewarding application to see come to life. I think we are going to see more and more of these amazing applications come to life as the Myo is out in developers hands for more and more time.”

You can watch the announcement made by John’s Hopkins University and Thalmic Labs right here.