Mind-controlled bionic limbs replace limp hands

In another ground-breaking development in medical science, people with limp hands will now be able to have artificial replacements, which they can control with their brain, media reported Wednesday.

According to a report in The Independent, Austrian doctors have performed the world's first "bionic hand reconstructions", replacing a hand disabled by injury with a prosthetic that the patient can control with their mind.

The three Austrian patients who underwent the procedure were now able to pick up objects, pour water, use a key and pull up buttons with their artificial limb, the report said.

Several people around the world have now been fitted with bionic hands to replace lost or missing limbs, and a small number of them have been able to control those artificial hands with signals from the brain.

However, the patients involved in the latest case had been left with a functionless hand because of damage to the nervous system, and had to consent to doctors amputating their damaged limb in order to replace it with a prosthetic.

Signals from the brain to the lower arm can, in rare cases, be cut off following a high-speed collision injury, especially in motorcycle crashes or while playing rugby.

Doctors at the Medical University of Vienna were, however, able to create new nervous signals by transferring nerves and muscles from other parts of the patients' bodies into their arms.

The patients were trained to use a "hybrid hand", or a prosthetic attached to splints on their damaged hand, which required only a weak nerve signal to enable movement.

Once they had mastered this, patients were offered the choice of having their functionless hand amputated and replaced with a more sophisticated prosthetic.

Oskar Aszmann, a pioneer in bionic surgery who led the latest procedures, said that in the three patients who underwent the full procedure, the results were an improvement on existing surgical techniques.

"The scientific advance here was that we were able to create and extract new neural signals via nerve transfers amplified by muscle transplantation," he said. "These signals were then translated into solid mechatronic hand function."

The outcome of the procedures, carried out at Vienna's Christian Doppler Laboratory for Restoration of Extremity Function, and assisted by engineers from the University Medical Centre Gottingen, was published in The Lancet medical journal Wednesday.

Stefan Salminger, who also worked on the new technique, said the prosthetic was a "helping hand" that enabled patients to perform daily tasks with both hands much better than before.

"It's a valid treatment," he said. "But only if the patient wants it from a psychological point of view. We can't force anyone to do this -- it's losing a hand."

Last year, a Danish patient became the first to receive a bionic hand that could feel texture and the shape of objects.