You can probably complete an amazing number of tasks with your hands without looking at them. But if you put on gloves that muffle your sense of touch, many of those simple tasks become frustrating. Take away proprioception — your ability to sense your body’s relative position and movement — and you might even end up breaking an object or injuring yourself.
“Most people don’t realize how often they rely on touch instead of vision — typing, walking, picking up a flimsy cup of water,” said Charles Greenspon, PhD, a neuroscientist at the University of Chicago. “If you can’t feel, you have to constantly watch your hand while doing anything, and you still risk spilling, crushing or dropping objects.”
Greenspon and his research collaborators recently published papers in Nature Biomedical Engineering and Science documenting major progress on a technology designed to address precisely this problem: direct, carefully timed electrical stimulation of the brain that can recreate tactile feedback to give nuanced “feeling” to prosthetic hands.
The science of restoring sensation
These new studies build on years of collaboration among scientists and engineers at UChicago, the University of Pittsburgh, Northwestern University, Case Western Reserve University and Blackrock Neurotech. Together they are designing, building, implementing and refining brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) and robotic prosthetic arms aimed at restoring both motor control and sensation in people who have lost significant limb function.
On the UChicago side, the research was led by neuroscientist Sliman Bensmaia, PhD, until his unexpected passing in 2023.
See the full article, originally published January 16, 2025.
Several Neuro grad students (bolded) contributed to the research and publication in Nature and Science: “Evoking stable and precise tactile sensations via multi-electrode intracortical microstimulation of the somatosensory cortex” was published in Nature Biomedical Engineering in December 2024. Authors include Charles M. Greenspon, Giacomo Valle, Natalya D. Shelchkova, Thierri Callier, Ev I. Berger-Wolf, Elizaveta V. Okorokova, Efe Dogruoz, Anton R. Sobinov, Patrick M. Jordan, Emily E. Fitzgerald, Dillan Prasad, Ashley Van Driesche, Qinpu He, David Satzer, Peter C. Warnke, John E. Downey, Nicholas G. Hatsopoulos and Sliman J. Bensmaia from the University of Chicago; Taylor G. Hobbs, Ceci Verbaarschot, Jeffrey M. Weiss, Fang Liu, Jorge Gonzalez-Martinez, Michael L. Boninger, Jennifer L. Collinger and Robert A. Gaunt from the University of Pittsburgh; Brianna C. Hutchison, Robert F. Kirsch, Jonathan P. Miller, Abidemi B. Ajiboye, Emily L. Graczyk, from Case Western Reserve University; Lee E. Miller from Northwestern University; and Ray C. Lee from Schwab Rehabilitation Hospital.
“Tactile edges and motion via patterned microstimulation of the human somatosensory cortex” was published in Science in January 2025. Authors include Giacomo Valle, now at Chalmers University in Sweden; Ali H. Alamri, John E. Downey, Patrick M. Jordan, Anton R. Sobinov, Linnea J. Endsley, Dillan Prasad, Peter C. Warnke, Nicholas G. Hatsopoulos, Charles M. Greenspon and Sliman J. Bensmaia from the University of Chicago; Robin Lienkämper, Michael L. Boninger, Jennifer L. Collinger and Robert A. Gaunt from the University of Pittsburgh; and Lee E. Miller from Northwestern University.