A 45-year-old woman in Sweden has
undergone surgery to permanently implant a robotic hand that she
will be able to use on a daily basis in a world first, sources
said Tuesday.
The robotic hand was built thanks to the DeTOP European
project led by Christian Cipriani of the Pisa Scuola Superiore
Sant'Anna's Institute of Bio-robotics.
Experts are working to prepare two more operations, in Italy
and in Sweden, the sources said.
The Swedish woman, whose right hand was amputated in 2002, is
following a programme of rehabilitation to regain strength in
the muscles of her forearm, which were weakened after the
amputation, and, by using virtual reality, is learning to
control the robotic hand, researchers and scientists told
reporters on Tuesday.
In the next few weeks, they said, she will be able to go home
and use the new hand every day.
"Thanks to this human-machine interface that is so accurate,"
Cipriani said, "and thanks to the skill and degree of
sensitivity of the artificial hand, we expect that in the space
of a few months the woman will regain motor and perceptive
functions very similar to those of a natural hand".
The surgical operation took place in Goethenburg, at the
Sahlgrenska University Hospital.
The operating surgeons were Richard Brånemark and Paolo
Sassu.
They implanted into the forearm (radius and ulna) of the
woman titanium structures as a bridge between bones and nerve
endings on the one side and the robotic hand on the other, the
scientists said.
Thanks to 16 electrodes inserted into the residual muscles,
it was possible to establish a direct connection between the
prosthesis and the nervous system.
In this way, the robotic hand can be controlled in a more
effective way and it becomes possible to restore the sense of
touch too.
The implant was developed in Sweden by a group coordinated by
Max Ortiz Catalan, of the Integrum company, in collaboration
with the Chalmers University of Technology.
The robot hand was realised by the dalla Scuola Superiore
Sant'Anna in Pisa and the Prensilia company, a spin-off of the
Sant'Anna BioRobotics Institute, within the framework of the
DeTOP project (Dexterous Transradial Osseointegrated with neural
control and sensory feedback), financed by the European
Commission within the Horizon 2020 programme.
Other collaborators include the Swedish universities of Lund
and Gothenburg, the University of Essex, the Swiss Centre for
Eletcronics and Microtecnologiay, Rome's Università Campus
Bio-Medico, the Centro Protesi of Italian work-accident
insurance agency Inail and the Istituto Ortopedico Rizzoli in
Bologna.
Cipriani told ANSA that "the next implant will be made in
Italy by the dal Campus Biomedico di Roma and the Istituto
Ortopedico Rizzoli di Bologna".
"We are looking for a candidate who lends themself to an
intervention similar to that carried out in Sweden, but who has
a different case file".
For this reason, he said, it is hard to predict when the
operation will take place.
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