(19 Apr 2017) LEADIN:
Could gaming technology be used to help relieve the sensation of phantom limb pain felt by amputees years - even decades - after losing a limb?
Experts at a Gothenburg university are developing a treatment that uses augmented reality, a technology more often used to catch Pokemon than in medical care.
STORYLINE:
More than 50 years since Ture Johansson's right hand was amputated, he opens and closes some new virtual fingers displayed on a screen.
The 75-year-old amputee is benefiting from high-tech pain treatment - created by experts at Gothenburg's Chalmers University of Technology.
It's a new method for treating phantom limb pain, a painful sensation often felt by amputees in the area their missing limbs once were. It can sometimes grow into a serious chronic condition.
Johansson suffered from phantom limb pain for years, continually jolting him awake in the middle of the night. Hypnosis therapy worked for a while, but then the pain returned.
"When I could wake up in the night and have very hard (pain), but now I sleep always, all the night. It's nothing," he says.
In the past some treatments used mirrors to reflect an amputee's remaining arm and therefore seemingly recreate the missing one.
Chalmers University assistant professor Max Ortiz Catalan decided to recreate the missing arm virtually using augmented technology.
This method uses muscle signals from an amputated limb to control augmented environments onscreen.
Electrical signals in Johansson's muscles are picked up by small electrodes placed on his skin. Using artificial intelligence, those signals are then translated into real-time movements of a virtual arm onscreen.
That means Johansson sees himself onscreen with a virtual arm in place of his missing one and can control it just like he would a real biological arm.
He lost his arm in a car accident during his 20s.
"I think it's my own arm, I can see it is a piece of myself. So I can try to move it," he says.
The idea is to reactivate areas of the brain used before the arm was amputated, thought to be key to decreasing phantom limb pain as a whole.
Much is still unknown about why phantom limb pain and other phantom sensations occur, but it's thought to be caused by changes in the brain that occur after losing a limb.
"A lot of these patients will say; 'Well, I don't really miss my hand as much or the things I could do with my hand, I could even live without that part a long as I don't have pain.' Because pain always jumps in priorities," says Ortiz Catalan.
"So that's why we started looking into what is known in pain and came out with this treatment that we thought at the time will be a better solution than what was available."
Augmented reality (AR) is a combination of virtual reality and real information from the physical world.
It's perhaps best known for its starring role in popular mobile game 'Pokemon Go,' which seemingly transported moving Pokemon creatures into the real world.
To create the virtual arm, a unique marker is placed on Johansson's stump, allowing him to move freely while the virtual arm follows.
"Augmented reality, it got a lot of hype in the past years and you can see a lot of applications where you don't really need to use augmented reality, people will use it just because it's cool," says Ortiz Catalan.
"In this case, it came out as the ultimate mirror therapy. So, you have a person that has a missing arm and then you can use augmented reality to restore that arm. So, it's really when you need to add something that's not there is when augmented reality becomes valuable."
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