Soft robotic glove offers a helping hand to those relearning to play piano after a stroke

People who have suffered a stroke know a helping hand can go a long way. Scientists have come up with just that. They invented a robotic glove that lends a helping hand to people who have suffered a stroke to relearn to play the piano. It could make their life more enjoyable and in turn, help their recovery. Florida Atlantic University is to be credited for this great idea and invention. With the use of AI, it helps pianists to feel some sensation in their hands and thereby play the instrument. "Combining flexible tactile sensors, soft actuators, and AI, this robotic glove is the first to 'feel' the difference between correct and incorrect versions of the same song and to combine these features into a single hand exoskeleton," states the Florida Atlantic University Press.

It is not a robotic limb but a robotic piece of clothing. Polysynthetic fibers and hydrogel have been used to make the glove. "Playing the piano requires complex and highly skilled movements and relearning tasks involves the restoration and retraining of specific movements or skills," said Erik Engeberg, Ph.D., senior author and a professor at the university. "Importantly, although this study's application was for playing a song, the approach could be applied to myriad tasks of daily life and the device could facilitate intricate rehabilitation programs customized for each patient."

According to Frontiers, a study conducted to see how the glove performs revealed that the glove could achieve "Mary Had a Little Lamb" with 97% accuracy, and even without any human intervention, the accuracy was at 94%. It is indeed a welcome intervention to help patients who have suffered from a stroke.

In another story about a revolutionary scientific discovery, scientists have successfully created a replica of the black hole and it can solve several questions about this phenomenon, reports Science Alert. A team of scientists observed the equivalent of Hawking radiation using a chain of atoms in a single file to recreate the event horizon of a black hole. Hawking radiation describes hypothetical particles created by the boundary of a black hole. This radiation reportedly suggests that the temperatures of black holes are inversely proportional to their mass. In simpler words, the smaller the black hole, the hotter it will glow.

According to scientists, this discovery might aid in resolving the conflict between two currently incompatible frameworks for understanding the universe. The general theory of relativity, which defines gravity's behavior as a continuous field known as spacetime and quantum mechanics, which uses probability mathematics to describe the behavior of discrete particles. It is where black holes come in. They are so dense that nothing can return from beyond a certain distance of a black hole's center of mass. This distance—which varies depending on the mass of the black hole—is called the event horizon.

It has previously been done, but now a team led by Lotte Mertens of the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands has done something unique. They created a kind of event horizon that interfered with the wave-like nature of the electrons. According to the scientists, the action of this simulated event horizon created a temperature rise that matched theoretical expectations of a comparable black hole system, but only when part of the chain stretched beyond the event horizon. The researchers wrote, "This can open a venue for exploring fundamental quantum-mechanical aspects alongside gravity and curved spacetimes in various condensed matter settings."