Patient Describes the Sensation of 'Feeling' Prosthetic Arms

Buz Chmielewski has a C6 spinal cord injury and is paralyzed from the shoulders down, with some residual function in his shoulders and wrists. In a recent study, he has been able to control the APL-developed Modular Prosthetic Limb. In this video, he describes the sensation of "touching" things with the prosthetic arms.

In January, in a first-of-its-kind surgery, a team at Johns Hopkins implanted intracortical microelectrode array sensors on both sides of a patient’s brain, in the regions that control movement and touch sensation. As part of the surgery, researchers pioneered a method to identify the best locations for placing the electrodes using real-time mapping of brain activity during the surgery.

“For the first time, our team has been able to show a person’s ability to ‘feel’ brain stimulation delivered to both sides of the brain at the same time. We showed how stimulation of left and right finger areas in the brain could be successfully controlled by physical touch to the MPL fingers,” explained APL’s Dr. Matthew Fifer, the technical lead on the project. This study benefits from the world’s first human bilateral implant for recoding and stimulation, including 96 electrodes that can be used to deliver very focused neural stimulation to the finger areas of the brain.

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