“I can feel touching my daughter’s hand or touching my wife’s hand, or picking up a hollow eggshell without crushing it,” Anderson says of his work with Psyonic, a startup operating out of the University of Illinois’ Research Park, in Urbana-Champaign. Psyonic expects to provide commercial prostheses with pressure sensing next year, and ones with sensory feedback sometime after that.

Technology is on the threshold of turning the unthinkable into reality. Awkward, unfeeling prostheses are morphing into mind-controlled extensions of the human body that give their wearers a sense of touch and a greater range of motion.

Along with sensory feedback, Psyonic’s rubber and silicone prosthesis uses machine learning to give its wearers intuitive control. The Modular Prosthetic Limb from Johns Hopkins University promises to deliver “humanlike” strength, thought-controlled dexterity and sensation. It’s currently in the research phase. And Icelandic company Ossur is conducting preclinical trials on mind-controlled leg and foot prostheses. These and other advances could make it dramatically easier for amputees to perform the sorts of tasks most people take for granted.

Nearly two years ago, Chmielewski underwent a 10-hour brain surgery at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore as part of a clinical trial originally spearheaded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and leveraging advanced prosthetic limbs developed by the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory. Its goal was to allow participants to control [assistive devices](https://medicalxpress.com/tags/assistive+devices/), and enable perception of physical stimuli (touching the limbs) using neurosignals from the brain. Surgeons implanted six electrode arrays into both sides of his brain, and within months he was able to demonstrate, for the first time, simultaneous control of two of the [prosthetic limbs](https://medicalxpress.com/tags/prosthetic+limbs/) through a brain-machine interface developed by APL.

For more than 30 years—following an accident in his teens—Robert “Buz” Chmielewski has been a quadriplegic with minimal movement and feeling in his hands and fingers. But last month he was able to manipulate two prosthetic arms with his brain and feed himself dessert.

Buz’s accomplishment marks a big step toward restoring function and autonomy for patients affected by an illness or injury that results in the partial or total loss of use of all four limbs and torso.

“It’s pretty cool,” said Chmielewski, whose sense of accomplishment was unmistakable after using his thoughts to command the robotic limbs to cut and feed him a piece of golden sponge cake. “I wanted to be able to do more of it,” he said.