A New Bionic Hand Can Tell What It’s Touching, Just Like A Human
A new prosthetic hand offers strength, grasps objects with control, and detects textures, coming the closest yet to mimicking human touch. It significantly outperforms traditional prosthetics, which forces amputees to make compromises.
With traditional prosthetics, they can choose between gentleness or gripping power, but neither option allows them to feel what they’re touching.
Now, researchers from Johns Hopkins University have made a breakthrough to solve these issues once and for all.
The research team has developed a “natural biomimetic prosthetic hand” that combines a rigid skeleton with soft, flexible joints while adding touch-sensing abilities.
In the fingertips, a multilayered sensor system enables the prosthetic to identify textures and objects with an accuracy rate of 98.38 percent.
“The goal from the beginning has been to create a prosthetic hand that we model based on the human hand’s physical and sensing capabilities—a more natural prosthetic that functions and feels like a lost limb,” said Sriramana Sankar, the lead author of the study and a biomedical engineer at Johns Hopkins.
“We want to give people with upper-limb loss the ability to safely and freely interact with their environment, to feel and hold their loved ones without concern of hurting them.”
The team built a hand with a hard 3D-printed internal skeleton surrounded by soft joints made of silicone that can be independently controlled. That way, they could have the best of both worlds without needing to choose between rigid or soft designs.
However, their biggest innovation was the touching-sensing system in the fingertips. The researchers incorporated three types of sensors within the prosthetic fingertips to imitate the function of human skin.
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Human skin contains specialized cells called mechanoreceptors that detect touch, from light pressure and vibrations to the stretching of the skin.
The artificial system works by converting touch data into patterns that resemble the electrical signals our nerves would usually send to our brains.
When the hybrid hand was asked to identify 26 different textured surfaces in lab tests, it achieved 98.38 percent accuracy. On the same surfaces, rigid prosthetic fingers had 83.02 percent accuracy, while soft robotic fingers had 82.31 percent.
In addition, the hand was tested with 15 everyday objects, such as dishes, water bottles, fruit, and stuffed toys. It recognized these items with 99.69 percent accuracy and handled them appropriately.
The hand’s most impressive feat was when it used just three fingers to pick up a thin plastic cup filled with water without crushing or denting it. This task would’ve been nearly impossible for traditional prosthetics to accomplish.
“We’re combining the strengths of both rigid and soft robotics to mimic the human hand,” said Sankar. “The human hand isn’t completely rigid or purely soft—it’s a hybrid system, with bones, soft joints, and tissue working together. That’s what we want our prosthetic hand to achieve. This is new territory for robotics and prosthetics.”
For those who have lost their hands, this bionic hand might be a feasible replacement one day. It has not yet been tested on amputees, but it’s looking like the future of prosthetics.
The study was published in Science Advances.
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