Is there other similar/better method like TENS units for external control of human muscles?
This question inspired by an answer to my previous question
My goal is to identify an external device that can be attached to a person to puppet the person's body.
A TENS units can cause a muscle to contract. It can be used as an outside-the-body way to control of the muscles of a human body.
However, such contractions yield very little control. Our muscles are organized into muscle units, which are small groups of fibers within a muscle that always contract together. Our bicep has about 53 of them, and we recruit them in various orders to have fine control over our motion. If one is using TENS style electrical fields, it's hard to affect them one at a time -- you tend to contract the whole muscle. An individual being controlled in this way would be jerky, like a zombie.
To get a sense of what it would be like, consider playing QWOP, a game which challenges you to run by controlling the leg muscles directly.
Is there another similar/better method like TENS units or a solution to make it to affect muscle groups one at a time rather than whole muscle?
Any method/stuff that goes inside the body is out of scope for this question.
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1 answer
Theoretically you could do this using magnetic stimulation of neurons. The magnetic field induces an electrical potential in the neuron which actives the neurons and it can work from (small) distance without requiring electrodes on the body.
Current devices are pretty coarse and can only affect moderately large areas of the brain either by activating or passivating them with the magnetic field (transcranial magnetic stimulation). However theoretically you could create a device that is accurate and strong enough to stimulate individual motor nerves or small areas of the motor cortex to trigger desired motor functions.
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