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Mechanical hand can feel

14.10.2014

Thanks to new technology, a person with a prosthetic hand can distinguish which of the artificial fingers he touches objects. In addition to improved sensitivity, scientists have also developed a more comfortable way to attach artificial hands to the body.

An ideal limb prosthesis should have the same properties as a real limb - it should move and feel the same way. Considerable progress has been made regarding the mobility of artificial arms and legs, but what about sensitivity? We feel cold, warm, we can distinguish a pen from sandpaper thanks to many special receptors located in the skin and connected with the brain. Is it possible to make a similar sensitivity system in a prosthesis?

For developers of biomechanical prostheses, one of the main tasks was to make the artificial limb correctly feel mechanical pressure. For example, if a person wants to take a glass with an artificial hand, he must calculate the grip strength so as not to crush it, and for this you just need to accurately feel the pressure of the glass surface on the fingers and palm. For almost 40 years, experiments have been going on in which neuroscientists have been trying to create a satisfactory feedback between the brain and an artificial hand with electronic pressure sensors. However, success has been achieved only very recently: Silvestro Micera (Silvestro Micera) from the Federal Polytechnic School of Lausanne (Switzerland) and his colleagues reported in February in the pages of Science Translational Medicine that they managed to create a hand that could not only gently take a glass, but and to distinguish by touch a round object from a square one.

The biomechanical prosthesis was equipped with sensors that estimated the pressure of the hand on the object by the tension in the artificial tendons that control the movements of the fingers. In accordance with this voltage, the sensors generated an electrical signal, but in this form the nervous system would not understand it, so an algorithm was needed that would convert the signal into a language understandable to the nervous system. The converted impulse through the electrodes entered the nerves of the surviving shoulder.

But a few months later, another article appeared in Science Translational Medicine, in which a group of researchers from Case Western Reserve University (USA) claims that they managed to make a more sensitive prosthesis. They used more than a dozen pressure sensors, which were converted into electrical impulses of various strengths and durations. These impulses were transmitted to the nerves through three electrodes implanted under the skin. Each electrode connected to only one nerve, but there were many connection points between them: two people with amputated hands participated in the study, one of them had a nerve connected to the electrode with twenty contacts, the other had a smaller number. As a result, the designers achieved greater detail of sensations: a person could distinguish what exactly he touches the surface with an artificial little finger or an artificial thumb.

Moreover, volunteers with artificial hands could distinguish, for example, sandpaper from a smooth or ribbed surface, and if the hand lay on two surfaces at the same time, the person could tell which part of the hand felt what. The mechanical hand made it possible to pick up a berry without damaging it and smear toothpaste on a toothbrush - rather subtle actions that require coordination of sensations and applied force. The reliability of sensations depended on the number of "inputs" between the electrode and the nerve, as well as on the accuracy of computer signal transformations. If earlier the sensations from the prosthesis were limited to a more or less strong tingling, now, with the help of the design created by Dustin Tyler (Dustin Tyler) and his colleagues, the biomechanical sensations have become more real.

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