In a firework accident 10 years ago, Dennis Sorenson lost his left hand.
A faulty firework rocket exploded in Sorenson's hand during a New Year's Eve celebration, which resulted in doctors having to amputate his limb. Since the accident, Sorenson, 36, had been using a standard prosthesis that performed most day-to-day tasks. However, the Danish man still wasn't able to feel — at least until he participated in a study for a new prosthetic hand.
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Created by a team of researchers at the Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, Switzerland, Lifehand 2 enables users to regain feeling in their hands through a surgical procedure where surgeons insert tiny electrodes into the arm; these electrodes then connect sensors in each finger of the prosthetic hand to nerves in the arm.
“The goal of our project was to provide sensory information to an amputee in real-time in order to increase the usability of the prosthesis — to give back as much as possible natural sensory information,” Silverstro Micera, director of the Translational Neural Engineering Laboratory at the Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, told NPR. "These are the nerves which connect the hand to the brain. They are the natural ones conveying the sensory information from our natural sensors in the fingers in the hand back up to the brain.”
After undergoing the surgery, Sorenson began testing Lifehand 2 in a clinical trial at Rome's Università Campus Bio-Medico di Roma last February. While wearing a blindfold and earplugs, Sorenson was able to distinguish between the shape and consistency of multiple items, noting the differences between a mandarin orange and a baseball, a short bottle and a tall bottle, and a wooden block and a piece of fabric.
"It was really, really amazing because suddenly my artificial hand and my brain were working together for the first time in many years," Sorensen said. "It was very close to be like your normal hand."
Research from the trial was published Wednesday in Science Translational Medicine.
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