(energetic music)
- [Narrator] We're all familiar with prosthetic limbs.
If you're not, please see seasons one through five
of this show, Superhuman, from Freethink.
It's like wall to wall prosthetics.
- [Doctor Osborn] It's amazing what prosthetic technology
has come to in the past several decades.
A lot of progress has been made on how you control the limb,
but, now we want to be able to feel something with it.
- [Narrator] This is the E-Dermis.
A prototype for a technology to give users
a sense of touch for their prosthetic devices.
This is Dr. Luke Osborn. He's a researcher at
Johns Hopkins University.
And, for the last several years
he's been developing the E-Dermis:
a flexible sensor that can, for some prosthetic users,
provide a sense of touch.
- [Dr. Osborn] I think it's really interesting
to take a step back, and think about how important
touch is to our everyday lives.
We've gotten really good, as humans, at being able
to quickly identify things just based on what
they feel like, and unfortunately, there aren't
prosthetic limbs on the market that provide
sensory feedback to an amputee.
They don't get information back about what it is
they're touching unless they're looking at
the thing that they're grabbing.
- [Narrator] Dr. Osborn wants to tap into a phenomenon
nearly eighty percent of amputees experience:
Phantom limb syndrome.
- [Doctor Osborn] Phantom limb sensation is one where
you've lost a limb, or part of your limb,
but you can still feel it.
The region of the brain that represents the limb
is still there and still working to some extent.
So let's see if we can tap into that
to get them to feel something that maybe
they haven't felt for twenty years.
- [Narrator] Dr. Osborn started by developing
a flexible sensor that could mimic
the sensory qualities of human skin.
- If you were to look at a little
cross-section of your skin and see all
the different receptors you would notice that
they're not all in one layer.
They're offset, and some are higher up in
the skin than others.
And so, we build the E-Dermis to actually mimic that.
The top layer represents what we're calling the
nociceptive layer.
When it experiences something painful, it's going to
send you some information back.
So, the nociceptor gives your body
information about pain.
Further down in your skin you have mechanoreceptors.
Mechanoreceptors tell you information about
how hard you're pressing.
So, what we were really interested in is, okay,
what do we need to do to give somebody
the ability to feel something again.
And that can greatly influence
-Yeah
Something like this.
- [Narrator] This is Andrew Ruben.
Fifteen years ago, an injury left his hand and foot
without any sensation or mobility.
So, a few years ago he had them therapeutically amputated.
Before I had my prosthetic, I had a hand that
was already insense, that was paralyzed.
So, I couldn't feel my hand.
So, I'd bang it around, it would be traumatized.
I'd wound it, and not even know.
And eventually, that's why I decided
well, I'll get a hand that has function.
- [Narrator] To help Andrew regain a sense of touch,
Luke has to first map the nerves in Andrew's arms,
so they can send signals from the E-Dermis
to Andrew's brain.
I'm going to target your thumb.
Mhm.
Which is right here, and we're not going to move it,
we're just going to put the electrode right here on the tip.
After an amputation, the sensory nerves
that go through your arm up into your brain
generally are still there.
And so, what we're trying to do is find where they are.
-It's going to light up red
when the stimulation is on.
Okay.
Yes.
No.
It's hard to explain the feeling is like.
There's this, I guess, the visualization that goes on.
You reimagine what you had, what wasn't there before.
Right there, that's the--
- Okay.
- [Andrew] Painted that green, and that was the thumb.
- All right.
So would you say like, this?
- [Andrew] Yes.
- [Doctor Osborn] And, kind of as you move the probe right?
- [Andrew] Yeah.
During these experiments, it's not an experience
of loss that I experienced.
It's an experience of presence,
of "that's where my thumb is".
It's filled with possibility.
(dramatic music)
-[Dr. Osborn] Is that you, voluntarily? -[Andrew] This is me.
-[Dr. Osborn] Nice.
There was one moment we found today, where...
It wasn't one finger, two fingers, it was the whole hand.
And I said, this is like I stuck my hand in water
for the first time.
The E-Dermis itself is still being heavily researched
both at Johns Hopkins University,
and the Applied Physics Lab.
You can imagine incorporating something like temperature.
When we touch an object, we also know how hot or cold it is.
So, there are other aspects to touch that we haven't
addressed yet that would be really interesting to see
how those all play together.
- [Andrew] The sensory experience, what's interesting to me
is the way it gives me new abilities.
I no longer feel disabled.
- [Doctor Osborn] When we're able to take one of the sensors
we've built, put it on a prosthetic hand,
it provides some sensory feedback to an amputee,
and they say "wow, I haven't felt that in numbers of years".
Those never get old.
- [Narrator] We tend to think of our skin as
what separates us from the world.
But it's also what connects us to it.
This research holds the promise of allowing
prosthetics users that feeling of connection
that so many of us take for granted.
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