Brain implant provides sense of touch with robotic hand

For the first time, scientists have helped a paralyzed man experience the sense of touch through the use of a mind-controlled robotic arm.

The groundbreaking experiment, a collaboration between the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, involves electrodes smaller than a grain of sand implanted in the sensory cortex of the young man's brain. Researchers then stimulated this region, which is associated with sensation in the right hand, and effectively bypassed his damaged spinal cord. Because the paralyzed man was already connected to a robotic arm, when a researcher pressed the fingers of the prosthesis, the subject felt the pressure in the right fingers of his paralyzed hand.

The results of the experiment, which have been repeated over several months with the subject, offer a critical breakthrough in the recreation and restoration of function in people with paralyzed limbs: the ability not just to move those limbs, but something much more difficult - to feel them.

tass.ru