A testing participant controls a bionic hand through a brain-computer interface that allows him to feel pressure changes as the steering wheel moves i

Fine-tuned brain-computer interface makes prosthetic limbs feel more real

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2025-01-20 11:30:03

A testing participant controls a bionic hand through a brain-computer interface that allows him to feel pressure changes as the steering wheel moves in the hand.

You can probably complete an amazing number of tasks with your hands without looking at them. But if you put on gloves that muffle your sense of touch, many of those simple tasks become frustrating. Take away proprioception — your ability to sense your body’s relative position and movement — and you might even end up breaking an object or injuring yourself.

“Most people don’t realize how often they rely on touch instead of vision — typing, walking, picking up a flimsy cup of water,” said Charles Greenspon, PhD, a neuroscientist at the University of Chicago. “If you can’t feel, you have to constantly watch your hand while doing anything, and you still risk spilling, crushing or dropping objects.”

Greenspon and his research collaborators recently published papers in  Nature Biomedical Engineering  and  Science  documenting major progress on a technology designed to address precisely this problem: direct, carefully timed electrical stimulation of the brain that can recreate tactile feedback to give nuanced “feeling” to prosthetic hands.

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