Experiment adds sense of touch to artificial hand
To feel what you touch — that’s the holy grail for artificial limbs. “It is really putting the brain back in control of the system,” said biomedical engineer Dustin Tyler of Case Western Reserve University, who wasn’t involved with the European work but leads a team in Ohio that recently created and tested a similar touch-enabled hand. “That’s an important step.” Added neurobiologist Andrew Schwartz of the University of Pittsburgh: “It shows with a few sensors and some pretty elementary technology, that they can recover a fair amount of functionality.” To be sure Sorensen used touch, and didn’t cheat by looking or hearing telltale sounds, he wore a blindfold and headphones as Micera’s team handed him different objects. In Ohio, Tyler’s team recently issued video showing a blindfolded man gently pulling stems from cherries without crushing them, thanks to similar implanted nerve stimulators and a sensor-equipped prosthetic hand. In Pittsburgh, Schwartz’s team is about to test another approach — a brain-controlled robotic hand for the paralyzed that would “feel” through electrodes implanted in a brain region known as the sensory cortex.
Bionic arm combines intuitive motor control, touch and grip for the first time
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