Yes, you heard that right? With your prosthetic finger-tip you can feel the touch and sense the pain. Further you’ll be glad to hear that even an Engineer from Indian origin has contributed to this innovation.
The team of Engineers have developed an e-dermis that is created from fabric and is rubber laced with sensors. This e-dermis senses the stimuli and relays the impulses back to the peripheral nerves thus recreating the sense of touch.
The best part is that the e-dermis stimulates the peripheral nerves of the amputee’s arms electrically in a non-invasive way and enlivening the phantom limb.
As per the professor of Indian Origin Nitish Thakor at the John Hopkins University Maryland, USA this is for the first time a prosthetic hand offers various perceptions similar to that of a live human hand. It enables a human user to experience various perceptions like a simple touch to painful as well as noxious stimulus.
Though, pain is an unpleasant feeling it is important for a prosthetic to have it. Hence, they created a neuromorphic model that imitates the touch as well as pain receptors of a human nervous system. The test was successful and the subject using the phantom hand was able to perceive the sensations in terms of natural as well as reflexive reaction to pain on touching a pointed object and no pain on touching a blunt one.
As per the researchers this technology called e-dermis has a further scope of expansion and usage into making robotic systems even more human as well as usage in astronaut space suits and gloves.
The detailed study has been published in the Science Robotics Journal already. Well, technology is achieving newer heights day by day and this experiment is a living example of how bright or teched the future is going to be.
*Source form the internet