More bionics? You betchaNow we’re looking at the first bionic hand that can feel. The research is headed by Silvestro Micera, of the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland. He recently presented his work at the 2013 Annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Boston. The device will be wired directly into the patient’s nervous system and it is hopeful that the patient will be able to not only control the bionic hand, but also receive touch signals from the hand’s skin sensor. “This is real progress, real hope for amputees”, Dr. Micera said. There was an earlier version of this device that was developed for another amputee. However, that only had two sensory zones, while this latest one will have sensory zones on all the fingertips as well as the palm and wrists. It should be noted that the procedure has yet to be completed. They have performed clinical trials on amputees and have analyzed much of the motor neural signals involved in grasping an object. This information was then used to control a hand prosthesis that was placed near the subject but not physically attached to the arm of the amputee. The next step in these clinical trials is to actually attach the arm to an amputee, which will be performed on an unnamed man in his 20s living in Rome