A team of scientists in Italy and Sweden have been developing a sophisticated robotic hand, with fingertip sensors that feed directly into the arm's nerves. The overall look of the hand may be more like Nina Sharp's in Fringe than Luke Skywalker's in The Empire Strikes Back, but it does allow the wearer to actually feel the objects the hand touches. Just as the brain transmits data to robotic limbs — ordering them to grasp and release — so do the receptors feed data back to the brain. It not only returns to the wearer the sensation that they had lost, it likely also makes grabbing and manipulating objects an easier and more precise task.

You can see the robotic hand in action below, as a 22 year-old who lost his hand to cancer tries out the hand and its sensitive fingertips for the first time:

New robotic hand 'can feel' [BBC]

People who have lost their ability to speak still have active speech centers in their brain. Seeking to tap into the neurons firing in those centers, researchers at Boston University implanted a series of electrodes into the brain of Erik Ramsey, a man who has been in a locked in state since a brain stem injury when he was 16.

Of course, the electrodes are only there to pick up neuronal activity, so the researchers have had to come up with complex software to decode the raw signals into speech — in other words, to translate Ramsey's thoughts about speaking into actual sounds:

The software is designed to translate neural activity into what are known as formant frequencies, the resonant frequencies of the vocal tract. For example, if your mouth is open wide and your tongue is pressed to the base of the mouth, a certain sound frequency is created as air flows through, based on the position of the vocal musculature. Different muscle positioning creates a different frequency. Guenther trained the computer to recognize patterns of neural signals linked to specific movements of the mouth, jaw, and lips. He then translated these signals into the correlating sound frequencies and programmed a sound synthesizer to project these frequencies back out through a speaker in audio form.

So far, the technique's worked, albeit slowly. With a lot of concentration, Ramsey has been able to get the system to make all of the vowel sounds in the English language. But there are only a handful of those — the next stop is the hundreds of consonants, which could take years and a new, more sophisticated implant that can better understand what it is Ramsey is trying to say.

Source: Technology Review

Image, University of Pennsylvania