A prosthetic leg that can feel helped two men walk faster, more smoothly and with greater confidence. The artificial leg, outfitted with sensors that detect pressure and motion, also curbed phantom pain that came from the men’s missing legs, researchers report online September 9 in Nature Medicine.
Restoring these missing signals may greatly improve the lives of people who rely on prosthetic limbs (SN: 1/28/11).
Neuroengineer Stanisa Raspopovic of EHT Zürich and colleagues tested the device in two men, both of whom had a leg amputated above the knee. Their new prosthetic legs were outfitted with seven sensors that detect foot pressure on the ground and one sensor that decodes the angles of the knee joint. Electrodes implanted on the sciatic nerve, just above the amputation site, then stimulated the nerve with signals from the sensors on the prosthesis.
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