Artificial hand senses temperature and pressure

Dr Kianoush Nazarpour from Newcastle University, with a prosthetic hand

The aim is to develop an artificial hand that can sense temperature and pressure, and also forces moving across its surface. The real-time sensory information would be transmitted directly into the brain.

“The UK leads the way in the design of prosthetic limbs but until now one of the limiting factors has been the technology to allow the hand to communicate with the brain,” said Dr Kianoush Nazarpour, lecturer in Biomedical Engineering at Newcastle University, who is leading the project.

“If we can design a system that allows this two-way communication, it would help people to naturally reach out and pick up a glass, for example, whilst maintaining eye contact in a conversation, or pick up an apple without bruising it.”

Dr Paul Steenson, senior lecturer in the University of Leeds’ School of Electronic and Electrical Engineering, will make the electrodes that provide the bridge between the nervous system and the hand.

“We need microelectrodes made from flexible plastics that do not damage the tissue in the way that hard materials would,” he said.

“We need to build these connections at a minute scale: the diameter of the nerves can be smaller than the width of a human hair – and we want to be able to connect to collections of nerve fibres of this size within various nerve bundles.”

Other parts of the team will build fingertip sensors to give the prosthesis a realistic sense of touch and develop ways of sensing the hand’s position and movement. They also need to work out how to translate electronic signals to a form the brain understands.