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posted by janrinok on Friday October 14 2016, @08:32PM   Printer-friendly
from the touchy-feely dept.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2016/10/13/in-a-medical-first-brain-implant-allows-paralyzed-man-to-feel-again/

For the first time, scientists have helped a paralyzed man experience the sense of touch in his mind-controlled robotic arm. For the cutting-edge experiment, a collaboration between the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, electrodes smaller than a grain of sand were implanted in the sensory cortex of the man's brain. The electrodes received signals from a robot arm. When a researcher pressed the fingers of the prosthesis, the man felt the pressure in the fingers of his paralyzed right hand, effectively bypassing his damaged spinal cord The results of the experiment, which have been repeated over several months with 30-year-old Nathan Copeland, offer a breakthrough in the restoration of a critical function in people with paralyzed limbs: the ability not just to move those limbs, but to feel them.

[...] To test whether the new chips could allow him to experience touch, he was blindfolded so that he couldn't see what the researcher was doing. One by one, the researcher touched each of the fingers on the robot's right hand, and each time Copeland correctly identified the location of the touch. "I can feel just about every finger," Copeland said Wednesday. "Sometimes it feels electrical, and sometimes it's pressure, but for the most part, I can tell most of the fingers with definite precision. It feels like my fingers are getting touched or pushed."

Also at The Guardian, NPR, PBS, Nature, and the University of Pittsburgh.

Intracortical microstimulation of human somatosensory cortex (DOI: 10.1126/scitranslmed.aaf8083) (DX)


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