HAPTICS ACUPUNCTURE

Acupuncture is the science and art of human haptics - the ability to manipulate and activate haptic nervous system....by needle stimulation

Haptics refers to sensing and manipulation through touch. Since the early part of twentieth century, the term haptics has been used by psychologists for studies on the active touch of real objects by humans. In the late nineteen-eighties, when Scientists started working on novel machines pertaining to touch, it became apparent that a new discipline was emerging that needed a name. Rather than concocting a new term, we chose to redefine haptics by enlarging its scope to include machine touch and human-machine touch interactions. Our working definition of haptics includes all aspects of information acquisition and object  manipulation through touch by humans, machines, or a combination of the two; and the environments can be real, virtual or teleoperated. This is the sense in which substantial research and development in haptics is being pursued around the world today...

It may be possible to design a Haptics AcuRobot that can be programmed to do precisely the exact same things that a David or Kiiko can do? ....and a Haptix Nanobot that can get inside and do what we can do.

WoW - The future is interesting!

Some more if you are interested in this line of thinking -

It will be difficult - very very difficult & complex...

When a human user touches a real object directly or through a tool, forces are imposed on the user’s skin. The associated sensory information, mediated by sensors in the skin, joints, tendons and muscles, is conveyed to the brain by the nervous system and leads to haptic perception. The subsequent motor commands issued by the brain activate the muscles and result in, say, hand and arm motion that modifies the touch sensory information. This sensorimotor loop continues to occur during both exploration and manipulation of objects.
In order to create the sensation of touching virtual objects, we need to generate the reaction force of objects applied on the skin. Touching a real object through a tool is mimicked by the use of a force reflecting haptic interface device. When the human user manipulates the end-effector of the haptic interface device, the position sensors on the device convey its tip position to the computer. The models of objects in the computer calculate in real-time the torque commands to the actuators on the haptic interface, so that appropriate reaction forces are applied on the user, leading to haptic perception of virtual objects.

In order to develop haptic interfaces that are designed for optimal interactions with the human user, it is necessary to understand the roles played by the mechanical, sensory, motor and cognitive subsystems of the human haptic system. The mechanical structure of the human hand consists of an intricate arrangement of 19 bones connected by almost as many frictionless joints, and covered by soft tissues and skin. The bones are attached to approximately 40 intrinsic and extrinsic muscles through numerous tendons which serve to activate 22 degrees of freedom of the hand. The sensory system includes large numbers of various classes of receptors and nerve endings in the skin, joints, tendons, and muscles.
Appropriate mechanical, thermal or chemical stimuli activate these receptors, causing them to transmit electrical impulses via the afferent neural network to the central nervous system (of which the brain forms a part), which in turn sends commands through the efferent neurons to the muscles for desired motor action.
In any task involving physical contact with an object, be it for exploration or manipulation, the surface and volumetric physical properties of the skin and subcutaneous tissues play important roles in its successful performance. For example, the fingerpad, which is used by primates in almost all precision tasks, consists of ridged skin (about 1 mm thick) that encloses soft tissues composed of mostly fat in a semi-liquid state. As a block of material, the fingerpad exhibits complex mechanical behaviour -- inhomogeneity, anisotropy, rate and time-dependence. The compliance and frictional properties of the skin together with
the sensory and motor capabilities of the hand enable gliding over a surface to be explored without losing contact, as well as stably grasping smooth objects to be manipulated. The mechanical loading on the skin, the transmission of the mechanical signals through the skin, and their transduction by the cutaneous mechanoreceptors are all strongly dependent on the mechanical properties of the skin and subcutaneous tissues.

Extending the Haptics & Computer train of thoughts to Acupuncture:

I believe acupuncture works rather like pushing the keys of Keyboard/ Mouse-click/ Touch ( Haptics) on a Electronic computer. ( a simple action but - an expert programmer can write a very complex code elegantly using very few key strokes/ lines of code )

1. If we agree that our unconscious mind regulates the body functions then and our thought can affect the outcome positively or negatively.

2. If we adopt the concept that the body/mind is a bio-computer, which contains a fiole of somatotopic network of information about the state of the body, and is accessed both by thought and emotional energy, then by stimulating the acupuncture points by touch, needles, EA, LASER can have profound effects. (No need to worry about database - it is already there - Brain-memory-Storage hard-disk & DB !)

3. It is a virtual bio molecular-world- a holographic world, inside the bio-computer. Certain combination of acu-points stimulated instruct a response from the unconscious mind,CNS/ HPA BrainNet which works by changing not just the chemical messengers released, but also the autonomic impulses and several sub-systems - Musculo-Skelatal, Fascial, Neural, Chemical, Digestive, Thermal, Cardio Respiratory systems - all sub-systems in the BrainNet....The extent of changes depends on the usefulness of the stimulation? and already existing Brain Rules?

4. Brain Rules may be simple or complex depending on what we try to activate. It may have a encrypt and decrypt code that can be unlocked only by certain combination of stimulation keys ( AcuPoints)? This may be different from DNA Code ( which is probably hard-coded) - what we are talking about is Brain Operating system and application software that can be changed/customized for different sub-systems and their hardware ( Muscles, Heart, Lungs, Liver etc) to run the bio-computer.

5. This model makes some sense ....may be - but most of the research seems to be aimed at proving the effects rather than the mechanism of delivery. The Delivery side of Acupuncture needs more models, approaches, Research etc - may be

The reason I am worried about Delivery of Acupuncture is very simple. If it took 2500 years to invent and perfect Acupuncture - we should not spend the next 2500 years in trying to find How Acupuncture Works! With such low side effects - we should say - Lets do it WITH TECHNOLOGY.