A Chicago doc who makes high-tech prosthetic arms is working on adding a sense of touch to his creations.
In a paper this week in PNAS, Todd Kuiken and his colleagues say they surgically transferred vestigial arm and hand nerves into the chests of two patients long after the arms had been amputated. When a spot on the chest was touched, it registered in the brain as a sensation coming from the amputated hand. (The paper hasn’t yet been published online.)
As Forbes’s Science Business blog notes, Kuiken and Co., affiliated with the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago, have already used a similar technique to create prosthetic limbs that give recipients remarkable dexterity, allowing them to do things like pick up a styrofoam cup.
The new work “offers the possibility that an amputee may one day be able to feel with an artificial limb as although it was his own,” by adding sensors in the artificial hand and connecting them to the redirected nerves, the authors write.
Photo from Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago