Man controls robotic hand with his mind

A ROBOTIC hand has been successfully connected to an amputee, allowing him to feel sensations in the artificial limb and control it with his thoughts, European scientists said yesterday.

The experiment lasted a month, and the scientists say it was the first time a patient has been able to make complex movements using his mind to control a biomechanic hand connected to his nervous system.

The Italian-led team said that last year it implanted electrodes into the arm of the patient who had lost his left hand and forearm in a car accident. The prosthetic was not implanted on the patient, only connected through the electrodes. During a Rome news conference, video was shown of 26-year-old Pierpaolo Petruzziello as he concentrated to give orders to the hand placed next to him.

“It’s a matter of mind, of concentration,” Petruzziello said. “When you think of it as your hand and forearm, it all becomes easier.”

During the month he had the electrodes connected, Petruzziello learned to wiggle the robotic fingers, make a fist, grab objects and make other movements.

“Some of the gestures cannot be disclosed because they were quite vulgar,” joked Paolo Maria Rossini, a neurologist who led the team working at Rome’s Campus Bio-Medico, a university and hospital that specialise in health sciences.

The €2 million project, funded by the European Union, took five years to complete and produced several scientific papers.

Experts not involved in the study said the experiment was an important step forward in creating an interface between the nervous system and prosthetic limbs, but the challenge now is ensuring that such a system can remain in the patient for years and not just a month.

“It’s an important advancement on the work that was done in the mid-2000s,” said Dustin Tyler, a professor at Case Western Reserve University and biomedical engineer at the VA Medical Centre in Cleveland, Ohio. “The important piece that remains is how long beyond a month we can keep the electrodes in.”

After Petruzziello recovered from the microsurgery he underwent to implant the electrodes in his arm, it only took him a few days to master use of the robotic hand, Rossini said. By the time the experiment was over, the hand obeyed the commands it received from the brain in 95% of cases.

Petruzziello, an Italian living in Brazil, said the feedback he got from the hand was amazingly accurate.