ERC grant awarded to deliver natural sensations to prosthetic limbs

The European Research Council have awarded a EUR10m Synergy Grant to an international group, led by Prof Dario Farina of Imperial College London’s Department of Bioengineering, to develop prosthetic arms and legs that can sense the environment and deliver sensations to patients. The group includes Prof Oskar Aszmann from the University of Vienna and Prof Antonio Bicchi of the Italian Institute of Technology, and this Natural BionicS project is thought to be the first to combine neurointerfacing, neurosurgery and robotics through the experts in those fields.
Prof Farina said: “We have partly worked out how to let the brain command a prosthetic limb. Now, we want to reach fully natural control and to have the limbs talk back to the brain via natural sensations. Creating a hyper-reinnervated bio-hub is equivalent to building bio-connectors that will allow us to receive signals from the spinal cord and to provide sensations, such as the sense of limb position, into the spinal cord. In this way, we will be able to connect the spinal cord circuitries with robotic limbs to make them a natural part of the patient’s body.”