Losing a limb can be tragic, but it doesn’t have to give a story an
unhappy ending. Prosthetics have been an option for ages, and thanks to
advances in medical science, they’re only getting better and better. Now
there’s been another big advance — one that comes close to being just
like the real thing.
A joint effort between DARPA and Johns
Hopkins University has led to the creation of a new type of robotic
hand. Its key feature is that it can near-perfectly reproduce the sense
of tough in normal hands; once it hooks up to a person’s sensory and
motor cortices, that person can not only feel sensations, but also move
the hand freely. That movement isn’t quite a one-to-one comparison just
yet, since precise motions need a lot of feedback from the brain; still,
it’s a step in the right direction.
It’s worth noting that the
robotic arm was tested on a man who not only needed one, but had spent
the past decade paralyzed thanks to a spinal injury. Despite that, the
hand worked exactly as hoped, and he was able to feel sensations for the
first time in ages. It may take some time before the technology is
perfected, but there’s at least one person out there who’s satisfied.
