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EARTHDATE: November 15, 2009

Official News page 9


REAL LIFE NEWS: A BIONIC HAND YOU CAN FEEL WITH

by Hazed

Prosthetic limbs have been around for ages and they've got very sophisticated, allowing the users/wearers to perform many of the functions they would with a real limb. But now they are set to take a big leap forward in functionality by adding in haptic abilities. That means, the user can not only operate a hand as if it was his own, he can feel with it too.

Robin af Ekenstam has been fitted with this new type of robotic hand, which has a two-way hookup to the nerves in his arm. "I grab something hard, and then I can feel it in my fingertips, which is strange, as I don't have them anymore. It's amazing," he reported.

The new bionic hand has been called SmartHand. It contains four motors and forty sensors and can do everything that a normal hand can in terms of gripping, moving the fingerjoints separately, and so on. So far, so commonplace - that's what most robotic hands can do these days. But what makes SmartHand special is the way it has been linked to the nerves in Ekenstam's stump.

"Perfectly good nerve endings remain at the stem of a severed hand," explained Professor Yosi Shacham-Diamand of Tel Aviv University, whose team has been responsible for the nerve hookup between the arm and its user.

So far, Ekenstam is delighted with the performance of his new arm, and he says it took very little training to learn how to use it. Now the scientists - teams from Italy, Denmark, Ireland, Iceland and Sweden all contributed to the project - plan to refine the tech to offer more sensory input, and then perhaps apply it to other limbs.

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