Prosthetic limbs controlled by thought alone could soon be capable of vastly more complex movements, including a choice of different hand grasps and shoulder and elbow rotations.
In February, Todd Kuiken and colleagues at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago announced promising results from the first human trials of prosthetic limbs based on an approach known as targeted muscle re-innervation.
To equip a patient with a TMR prosthetic arm, they cut the redundant nerves serving nearby chest muscles that once helped support and move the missing limb. Then they separate out the motor nerves in the arm stump that used to…
