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“It’s like waking up something as if it had been dead.”
That is how Greg Clark, associate professor in bioengineering, describes his work creating bionic hands for amputee patients. This week, the research team received a $1.4 million grant to further development on a bionic hand ready to implant. The grant is a continuation of funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which is looking to help wounded soldiers who lost limbs in the war.
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Currently, the team is working with four amputee victims to provide a real hand experience through a computer interface. Researchers connect cells in the patient’s brain to the system and they can control an imaginary hand seen on the screen with their thoughts. The ultimate goal is to take a highly advanced prosthetic hand and plug it into the patient’s nervous system, Clark said.
Amputees and prosthetics have been studied for years because of the mysterious nature of the absent hand, or phantom hand. This is the name for the phenomenon where patients can neurally feel the movement of limbs that are no longer there.
“The physical hand is missing, but the hand still exists in the brain,” Clark said.
Individuals with a phantom hand can sometimes even feel pain where the limb use to be. The bionic hand is designed to help with those problems.
Although prosthetics are common today, those currently available do not allow patients to move the hand with their thoughts, Clark said. Most patients who have one consider it more of an accessory than a physical part of them. In contrast, the bionic hand will be an actual appendage that helps patients feel “whole again.”
David Page, a graduate student in bioengineering and a member of the team, was excited to see the project moving along. For Page, the most rewarding moment was when after many failed attempts, a patient is able to move the robotic hand on the computer screen.
“That day when we put the patient on and he was suddenly able to move all his fingers and point … that was a good day for all of us,” Page said.
Clark and Page said they are driven to helping people. One patient lost his hand in an electrical wire accident 21 years ago and compared it to losing a family member. Being able to not only move a virtual hand but feel sensation was life-changing.
“Sharing some of that experience, if only in a vicarious way from a distance, and seeing the impact on an individual made us ever-more motivated to try to re-create that in everyday life,” Clark said.
Although the research still has a long way to go, Page sees many ways to apply the technology to other fields such as spinal cord damage and paralysis.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is funding projects all over the nation to create bionic limbs, but Page sees it more as a collaboration than a competition.
He said, “Whether one piece comes from us and another piece comes from other groups … in the end, we don’t really care. As long as we get something together that works.”
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