A pioneering surgical procedure provides amputees with bionic limbs that are directly controlled by the nervous system, enabling patients to sense the limb’s position in space.
Scientists demonstrated the success of this technique in a new study of seven people who received bionic legs, which was published Monday (July 1) in the journal Nature Medicine. Including these seven, about 60 people worldwide have undergone this type of procedure, which can be used to install either bionic legs or arms.
“This is the first prosthetic study in history that shows a leg prosthesis under full neural modulation, where a biomimetic gait emerges,” Hugh Herr, co-senior study author and a professor of media arts and sciences at MIT, said in a statement. In other words, the synthetic prosthesis is able to fill in for the lost function of the missing limb and thus produce a natural gait.
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