Hand-hacking lets you pluck strings like a musical pro

PossessedHand: Techniques for controlling human hands using electrical muscles stimuli from rkmtlab on Vimeo.

Want to learn a musical instrument, but can’t find the time to practise? A device now under development can take control of your hand and teach you how to play a tune. No spirits of dead musicians are involved.

PossessedHand, being developed jointly by the University of Tokyo, Japan, and Sony Computer Science Laboratories, also in Tokyo, electrically stimulates the muscles in the forearm that move your fingers. A belt worn around that part of the subject’s arm contains 28 electrode pads, which flex the joints between the three bones of each finger and the two bones of the thumb, and provide two wrist movements. Users were able to sense the movement of their hands that this produced, even with their eyes closed. The user’s fingers are controlled without the user’s mind, explains Emi Tamaki of the University of Tokyo, who led the research — via redwolf.newsvine.com