First ‘bionic woman’ says she has her life back

THE first ever partly ‘bionic woman’ has been introduced to the world by American doctors, after she was successfully ‘re-wired’ to accept a new bionic arm.

Claudia Mitchell, a former Marine who lost her left arm at the shoulder in a motorbike accident, now has a replacement she can control by her thoughts alone. The arm works by detecting the movements of a chest muscle that has been rewired to the remnants of nerves that once went to her real limb.

Ms Mitchell, 26, can now fold clothes, eat a banana and do the washing up.

The night before she showed her arm off to the media, she cut her own steak for the first time since her accident more than two years ago. And she has even added nails and a French manicure to the fake limb.

“I can move my elbow up and down and I can open and close my hand simply by thinking that that’s what I want to do,” Ms Mitchell told CNN.

Ms Mitchell is the first woman to be fitted with the experimental arm, being developed by the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago (RIC).

It costs about €47,500 and takes five hours to install in an operating theatre. Then there is a five-month wait before the redirected nerves are able to operate the arm.

“Before the surgery, I doubted that I would ever be able to get my life back,” Ms Mitchell said.

“But this arm and the RIC have allowed me to return to a life that is more rewarding and active than I ever could have imagined.”

She conceded that the arm, which weighs 5kgs, was “pretty heavy”.

“The more motors you add on, the heavier it gets,” she told CNN.

“However, having the weight is worth what range of motion I get with it.”

There has been the occasional problem.

“I poked myself in the eye once,” she said.

The science behind the device also means that when Ms Mitchell is touched on the patch of skin on her chest where the sensation nerves to the hand have been re-routed, she feels that her hand is being touched.

Eventually this will let her “feel” what she is touching with an artificial hand.

Ms Mitchell, from Ellicott City, Maryland, said doctors had never promised that the arm would be a success, but it had not deterred her.

She became interested in the possibility of a bionic arm after reading about Jesse Sullivan, a double amputee from Tennessee, who was the first person to get one.

More than 400 US military personnel who have had amputations after being wounded in Afghanistan and Iraq could benefit from the bionic arm technology.

Todd Kuiken, the director of RIC’s Neural Engineering Centre for Bionic Medicine, said: “It is so rewarding for me as a physician and a scientist to lead research with the potential to positively impact the lives of amputees, including US service men and women.”