14 DAY TRIAL // As though DARPA wasn't staying enough in the limelight of extraordinary technological feats and technology research, the agency has recently announced that it has successfully tested an artificial hand that gave a man a "near natural" level of touch.
According to the press release, the test patient, a 28-year-old man who has been paralyzed for more than a decade, could tell when scientists were pressing a specific finger on his arm, and even when they tried to trick him, by touching two digits at once.
What's impressive is that they augmented the thought-controlled arm with extra electrode arrays placed onto the paralyzed volunteer’s sensory cortex - the brain region responsible for identifying tactile sensations such as pressure, so that his brain would immediately receive a tactile information. Besides that, they also placed arrays on the motor cortex to direct body movements.
For their tests, scientists used a mechanical hand developed by the Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) at Johns Hopkins University, which contains torque sensors that can detect when pressure is being applied to any of its fingers, and can convert those physical “sensations” into electrical signals. The team used wires to route those signals to the arrays on the volunteer’s brain.
According to DARPA's program manager Justin Sanchez, “Prosthetic limbs that can be controlled by thoughts are showing great promise, but without feedback from signals traveling back to the brain it can be difficult to achieve the level of control needed to perform precise movements. By wiring a sense of touch from a mechanical hand directly into the brain, this work shows the potential for seamless bio-technological restoration of near-natural function.”
In other words, this might be the first successful, truly augmented human that receives a full mechanical arm with every feature that a real hand has, and not just another fancy prosthetic.