The good news is
that some touch has been synthesized and can now be plausibly built into a
prosthetic for use. It is obviously
early days but the actual outcome was great.
It does work and can be applied in the future. This is called proof of concept.
Thus it is
pretty well proved.
Touch sensitive
prosthetics will be much safer and far more useful to work. Thus the next decade will see a swift
maturation of both the devices and this feature. The true day of the bionic man is fast
approaching.
First
man/machine nerve grafts restore amputee's sense of touch
Wired prosthetic hand means we can rebuild him,
temporarily
After years of research and hours of gruelling
surgery, scientists have successfully attached sensors from a prosthetic hand
to human nerve tissue to allow the device to
give its wearer a sense of touch.
###
Lucky Dane gets to feel balls again
"The sensory feedback was
incredible," reported the test subject, Danish amputee Dennis Aabo
Sørensen. "I could feel things that I hadn't been able to feel in over
nine years. When I held an object, I could feel if it was soft or hard, round
or square."
A team for Swiss and Italian scientists added a
feeling of touch by measuring the amount of movement needed to register sensation
using artificial tendons and converting that into data that was refined into a
signal human nerve sensors could understand. During a five-hour operation four
electrodes were grafted onto the ulnar and median nerves in Sørensen's upper
arm to enable the sense of touch.
"We were worried about reduced sensitivity in
Dennis' nerves since they hadn't been used in over nine years," says
Stanisa Raspopovic, first author of the research paper about
the operation published in the latest edition of edition of Science
Translational Medicine.
19 days of testing were required to ensure
incoming electronic signals
would be properly recognized by the subject's nerves. But the system worked
better than expected and the hand's fingertips were eventually capable of
relaying accurate touch data back to the Dane, allowing him to feel from a
prosthetic for the first time since losing his hand in a fireworks accident
nine years ago.
Sadly Sørensen will have to give up the touchy-feely
device and go back to his normal prosthetic now that the experiment is over,
but he said he was happy to take part in the experiment and was looking forward
to new developments.
He recounted that after losing his hand a doctor
told him "there are two ways you can view this. You can sit in the corner
and feel sorry for yourself. Or, you can get up and feel grateful for what you
have. I believe you'll adopt the second view."
"He was right," says Sørensen. ®
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