Brain Implant Allows Man to Feel Touch on Robotic Hand

At the end of Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back, Luke Skywalker feels when a needle pricks his newly-installed bionic hand. Researchers report today in the journal Science Translational Medicine that they can do something similar: stimulating regions of a human test subject's brain with electrodes can recreate the perception of touch in a robotic hand. This year, about 280,000 people in the United States alone are living with a spinal cord injury, according to the National Spinal Cord Injury Statistical Center. Depending on the severity, damaged nerve connections lead to effects ranging from a partial loss of feeling to complete loss of motion in different limbs. "If you lose that sense of touch, you have a really difficult time" grabbing, holding, and manipulating different objects, says Richard Gaunt, a neuroengineer at the University of Pittsburgh who works on touch feedback for prosthetics.