Photo courtesy of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
The U.S. military research agency DARPA has given an unnamed 28-year-old paralyzed man the ability to feel people touch his prosthetic hand.
DARPA is primarily known for its work in military robotics, such as weaponizing drones, but the agency also has a program dedicated to revolutionizing prosthetic limbs. This technology has been implemented in DARPA labs before, but this has “broken new neurological ground” because it routes electrical signals from the prosthesis directly back to the sensory cortex, the part of the brain that feels touch.
Before being fitted with the prosthetic hand, the 28-year-old volunteer subject underwent brain surgery to have tiny micro-electrode arrays implanted in his brain.
The hand, which was developed at the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University, has torque sensors that are able to detect applied pressure and then send electrical signals to the brain. Wires are run from the motor cortex, the part of the brain that controls movement, to the prosthesis.
Justin Sanchez, who manages the DARPA program, said in a released statement that the clinical trials proved that the feelings the man was perceiving through the prosthetic hand were “near-natural.”
“At one point, instead of pressing one finger, the team decided to press two without telling him,” he said. “He responded in jest asking whether somebody was trying to play a trick on him.”
This breakthrough in prosthetics technology could potentially help the more than 1.6 million people in the U.S. that are in need of prosthetic limbs, but it has not yet been standardized to be distributed to the masses.
“We’ve completed the circuit,” Sanchez said. “Prosthetic limbs that can be controlled by thoughts are showing great promise, but without feedback from signals traveling back to the brain it can be difficult to achieve the level of control needed to perform precise movements. By wiring a sense of touch from a mechanical hand directly into the brain, this work shows the potential for seamless bio-technological restoration of near-natural function.”
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