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4020600267_1
Amputee senses touch for first time with bionic hand

ANI | Washington February 06, 2014






Dennis Aabo Sorensen from Denmark has become the first amputee in the world
to feel - in real-time - with a sensory-enhanced prosthetic hand that was
surgically wired to nerves in his upper arm.
Silvestro Micera and his team at EPFL (Switzerland) and SSSA (Italy)
developed the revolutionary sensory feedback that allows people to feel.
Micera and his team enhanced the artificial hand with sensors that detect
information about touch. This was done by measuring the tension in
artificial tendons that control finger movement and turning this measurement into an
electrical current.
But this electrical signal is too coarse to be understood by the nervous
system. Using computer algorithms, the scientists transformed the electrical
signal into an impulse that sensory nerves can interpret.
The sense of touch was achieved by sending the digitally refined signal
through wires into four electrodes that were surgically implanted into what
remains of Sorensen's upper arm nerves.
The ultra-thin, ultra-precise electrodes, developed by Thomas Stieglitz's
research group at Freiburg University (Germany), made it possible to relay
extremely weak electrical signals directly into the nervous system.
A tremendous amount of preliminary research was done to ensure that the
electrodes would continue to work even after the formation of post-surgery
scar tissue. It is also the first time that such electrodes have been
transversally implanted into the peripheral nervous system of an amputee.
The study has been published in the journal Science Translational Medicine.