Temperature is one of the hardest aspects of touch to re-create for prosthetic users. This tiny patch could help people with amputated limbs sense coldness.
Grimes on Living Forever, Dying on Mars, and Giving Elon Musk Ideas for His Best TweetsTemperature perception seems to have special meaning in our social lives, says Emily Graczyk, a biomedical engineering professor at Case Western Reserve University who was not involved in this study. In her, Graczyk found that providing sensory feedback helps prosthesis wearers feel more confident and comfortable interacting with others and makes their artificial limbs feel more like a part of themselves.
In an amputation, the nerves that once relayed information between the brain and the limb are severed. But the ends of these nerves can regenerate. As they regrow, they innervate whatever tissue they can latch onto, like the skin on the residual limb. For a person with an upper limb amputation, that might be the area just above the wrist or the elbow. Zapping that skin with electricity can actually feel like a zap to the hand.
“Our traditional approach for restoring sensations for amputees is electrical activation,” stimulating a patch of skin with a small electrode, says Osborn. Nerve fibers that respond to mechanical aspects of touch, like pressure and vibration, are fat and insulated by a myelin sheath that keeps current from leaking out, making them easy to activate. But nerves that carry information related to temperature are tiny and don’t usually respond to electrical stimulation.
For prosthesis wearers to feel a chill, something must transmit an ultrafast temperature signal with sub-centimeter precision from the prosthesis to the skin to activate the nerves that once corresponded to the person’s fingers. Rama Venkatasubramanian, the chief technologist for thermoelectrics at the Applied Physics Lab, was up for the challenge.
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