[MUSIC PLAYING]
[CHANTING]
SHRIYA SRINIVASAN: I'm always amazed
by how intricately the body's mechanisms have evolved,
how miniature they are, how energy efficient
they are, how precise they are.
As a dancer, when you go to, say, like
execute a jump or a turn, the fact
that you're able to land where you want precisely
with such balance.
There are so many different parts
of the body that have to work together
to make that happen fluidly.
I mean the human body is just engineered so beautifully.
My name is Shriya Srinivasan, and I'm a biomedical engineer,
currently a junior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows.
I do research at MIT.
I'm also a professional dancer, and I've
been pursuing the Indian classical art
form of Bharatanatyam for the last 22 years.
Bharatanatyam is a South Indian classical art form.
I started learning it from my mother who's
a very famous Bharatanatyam exponent who runs
a school in Cleveland, Ohio.
So Bharatanatyam was always around the house
along with Carnatic music, which is the classical music
form that accompanies it since I was probably five.
And then when I was in college, I started my own dance company.
And together, we've been producing new works
and have toured around the United States.
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[NON-ENGLISH SINGING]
It's a very mime and storytelling-based dance form.
We have these small components called
Adavus, which form the basic unit of a portion of movement,
so just the eyes, just the face, hand gestures.
And we can build these into words and paragraphs and essays
and create these very technically challenging pieces
of movement that can also convey concepts.
And so we can produce things almost like Broadway musicals
and tell an entire story over the course of a production.
Earlier this year, I worked on something
called flight of the mind for the launch of the Center
for Extreme Bionics here at MIT.
That actually was about the development of human movement
and then the incidence of pathology or disability,
both mentally, emotionally, physically
and how we can use our own courage and our strength
and our ability to dig deep to overcome
some of these disabilities.
My research is broadly in the space of neural interfacing.
And so I work on connecting the human body
to the outside world.
In the case of amputation or paralysis,
we're talking about robotic prostheses or exoskeletons.
I'm specifically interested in how our mechanoreceptors work
and how they allow us to feel our external world,
whether that's grasping a coffee mug
or feeling with your feet the floor
or the ground to be able to balance.
I worked on something called the Agonist-Antagonist Myoneural
Interface, or the AMI for short.
This is a new surgical technique that
can allow patients to regain the ability
to feel the external world and feel what their prostheses are
feeling.
So after the AMI surgery is done,
we're able to take muscle signals from the limb
and use those to control a prosthetic robot
as well as send feedback from the robot about what
it's contacting and how it's moving back to the wearer.
The team has developed a variety of methods
to get those signals out one of them being
these sensors in the liner that's
worn here right over the limb.
And so we can take the muscle signals from there
and then feed those to the robot.
And then when the robot contacts something or senses
a force, for example, it can take that information
and send it back to the user by performing stimulation
on these electrodes.
And the stimulation will then cause one of the muscles
to contract, pulling on the other muscle
and basically using that natural relationship that we've
preserved in the limb to communicate that back
to the body in a way that the body already understands.
So that sensory feedback mechanism is very natural.
He has individual muscle control,
which most folks with an amputation don't.
SUBJECT: I had probably about a 20-year arc of pain.
I had no mobility in my ankle.
Now my life is great, very productive, very active.
I've gone back to ice climbing.
I'm back on my paddleboard.
Especially, as a carpenter, I can feel when I'm on a ladder.
I can feel if I'm stepping on a shingle.
I can tell if I'm stepping on the thick end of a shingle,
or I can tell if I'm stepping on the thin end of a shingle.
And so it's pretty amazing.
SHRIYA SRINIVASAN: So about 40 people today
have had these newer types of amputations.
It's been really a very, very meaningful journey
to see that transition in their lives.
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The kind of relief and sense of fulfillment
that I get from the arts is very different from what I
get from research and science.
I find that research often nourishes
my intellectual curiosity, and the arts
are helping to build that emotional and spiritual growth.
But in both worlds, I'm thinking about how
do we create a sense of feeling, how
do we control emotion and your physiological response.
And so that's really beautiful to me.