ABOVE: PAUL MARASCO, LABORATORY FOR BIONIC INTEGRATION
When Amanda Kitts’s car was hit head-on by a Ford F-350 truck in 2006, her arm was damaged beyond repair. “It looked like minced meat,” Kitts, now 50, recalls. She was immediately rushed to the hospital, where doctors amputated what remained of her mangled limb.
While still in the hospital, Kitts discovered that researchers at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago (now the Shirley Ryan AbilityLab) were investigating a new technique called targeted muscle reinnervation, which would enable people to control motorized prosthetics with their minds. The procedure, which involves surgically rewiring residual nerves from an amputated limb into a nearby muscle, allows movement-related electrical signals—sent from the brain to the innervated muscles—to move a prosthetic device.
Kitts immediately enrolled in the study and had the reinnervation surgery around a year after her accident. With her new prosthetic, Kitts regained a functional limb that ...
