The quest to build bionic limbs that feel like the real thing - Nature

Through brain implants, neural interfaces and skin grafts, researchers are starting to restore sensation for paralysed or amputated limbs.

Scott Imbrie still remembers the first time that physicians switched on the electrodes sitting on the surface of his brain. He felt a tingling, poking sensation in his hand, like “reaching into an evergreen bush”, he says. “It was like I was decorating a Christmas tree.”

Back in 1985, a car crash shattered three of Imbrie’s vertebrae and severed 70% of his spinal cord, leaving him with very limited sensation or mobility in parts of his body. Now, thanks to an implanted brain–computer interface (BCI), Imbrie can operate a robotic arm, and receive sensory information related to what that arm is doing. Imbrie spends four days a week, three hours at a time, testing, refining and tuning the device with a team of researchers at the University of Chicago in Illinois.

Scientists have been trying to restore mobility for people with missing or paralysed limbs for decades.

Read more on: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-03675-w