A multi-national team of doctors and robotics experts have created and successfully implanted SmartHand, the first artificial hand that can feel.
SmartHand, which contains 40 sensors, is wired to existing nerve endings to provide the sensation of feeling to amputees. The device is “able to perform at least the 80% of the grips necessary in activities.”
“When I grab something tightly I can feel it in the fingertips, which is strange because I don’t have them anymore,” says Robin af Ekenstam, the first recipient of SmartHand. Ekenstam lost his hand to an aggressive form of cancer, and previously used a motorized electric hook as a prosthetic.
The creators of SmartHand include teams from Sweden, Iceland, Italy and Israel. The $2.7 million project was funded by the European Union.
In addition to providing “feeling,” SmartHand is much lighter than many existing prostheses. And it was designed to fit within a cosmetic glove “to provide external appearance as the human hand.”
Researchers also hope that by wiring the hand directly to nerve endings, use of the SmartHand will ameliorate and perhaps eliminate “phantom pain” sometimes felt by amputees.
The device has the amputee community cautiously optimistic. Writes one blogger: “Now, this is extremely cool in terms of getting a feeling for a hand back. Will the implants on the nerves keep functioning? Will they not cause inflammation and get useless due to fibrosis? … How do these things perform under temperature variation, humidity, heat?”
This video shows project lead Professor Fredrik Sebelius testing the software that processes neural signals from the brain to the prosthesis.
This video shows a close-up of the wiring of the SmartHand.
