Amputee ‘feels again’ using bionic hand

SCIENTISTS have developed the first ‘Star Wars-style’ sensory bionic hand that can be used outside of a laboratory.

Almerina Mascarello, 62, who lost her left hand in an accident in a factory, was fitted with the robotic device which can be controlled by her brain and can feel what it holds.

It allow her to carry out actions that pose great difficulties for amputees – such as getting dressed.

Mrs Mascarello says the device ‘is almost like [her hand] is back again’. In tests, the married mother of two was able to tell whether an object she picked up with the device was hard or soft while blindfolded.

She told the BBC that the hand, developed in Rome, allows her to carry out her hobby of fixing cars.

In 2014 the same international team produced the world’s first feeling bionic hand but it was too big to leave the laboratory. The latest version is portable and fits in a rucksack. The development team from Italy, Switzerland and Germany linked information from the hand’s sensors to a computer in a rucksack that converts signals into impulses the brain will understand.

Data is relayed to Mrs Mascarello’s brain via tiny electrodes implanted in her arm’s nerves. She said: ‘The feeling is spontaneous as if it were your real hand; you’re finally able to do things that before were difficult, like getting dressed, putting on shoes – all mundane but important things – you feel complete.’

Professor Silvestro Micera, a neuro-engineer at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne said: ‘We are going more and more in the direction of science fiction movies like Luke Skywalker’s bionic hand in Star Wars...’

Mrs Mascarello kept the bionic hand for six months, but it has now been removed as it is a prototype.