If this isn’t extremely cool, I don’t know what is. To demonstrate that one can regain a sense via an artificial media if the interface is sophisticated enough opens doors of promise for so many people in so many ways. The ability to provide a sense of intuitive movement and feedback to prosthetics has been the Holy Grail of medicine since people first strapped carved pieces of wood to their bodies to replace missing limbs.

Surgeons working on a female amputee in Chicago, US, have re-routed the ends of the motor nerves – which once controlled her arm’s movement – into the muscles in her chest and side. And the ends of the sensory nerves, which fed signals responding to heat and touch from her now-amputated arm to her brain, have been transferred to the skin on her chest.

Claudia Mitchell, a 26-year-old former US marine, is already able to control her prosthetic arm with more skill than is possible with conventional devices. She can carry out simple tasks intuitively, such as cutting up food, and at four times the speed of someone with a conventional prosthesis. And she has regained the sensation of having her arm touched when someone touches the patch of skin on her chest.

Before the senses can be used to provide feedback, a prosthetic arm must be built to pick up sensory input and transmit it to the portion of the chest that feels like the hand.

There are quite a few robotic sensor systems using materials such as conductive plastics that could be ported over to prosthetics now that there is a way to transmit their input to the body, and the same goes in the motor and actuator side where the prosthetic interfaces with the person.

I wonder if they could use this technique to give heavy machine operators the ability to control a crane like that? I’d love to see them pull a Waldo and hook her up to a big mechanical arm and see if she can control it. That would really be an empowering technology.