(A) How a natural, biological afferent nerve is stimulated by pressure. (B) An artificial afferent nerve made of pressure sensors, an organic ring oscillator, and a synaptic transistor. (C) A photograph of the artificial afferent nerve system.REPRINTED WITH PERMISSION FROM Y KIM ET AL., SCIENCE 360:998 (2018) Feats of engineering though they may be, today’s prosthetic devices can be unsatisfying to the human brain. “If you have a hand [and] . . . you can control it in a very rough manner, but it doesn’t give any feedback, then it becomes more of a mental load for the patient, and they typically put their prosthesis onto the shelf after a while,” says Henrik Jörntell, a neurophysiologist at Lund University in Sweden.
But in a new invention announced today (May 31) in Science, Jörntell, who was not involved in the work, sees the possibility of one day remedying that. An international team of researchers reports the first known artificial nerve that can detect pressure—and even move the detached leg of a cockroach after the device was attached to the tissue. The authors suggest that similar sensors could one day incorporate into prosthetics to enable them to deliver touch information to users.
“[M]imicking complicated biological sensory nerve systems including all functional elements in the neural networks remains a great challenge,” coauthor and engineer Tae-Woo Lee of Seoul National University in South Korea writes in an email to The Scientist. The new artificial nerve system is an “unprecedented” step ...
