The bionic arm of the future is here: Scientists at the University of Utah have been experimenting with a bionic arm that can respond to your thoughts and feel what you touch.

• Author: Howell, Izzy

"WE ALL GREW UP WATCHING STAR WARS ... we saw Luke Skywalker get his arm replaced after a lightsaber duel," Clark says. "I was always interested and kind of fascinated by brain-machine interfaces and I just fell in love with it."

That's Gregory Clark, associate professor of biomedical engineering and director of the Center for Neural Interfaces at the University of Utah, he's spearheading a project dedicated to integrating bionic limbs with the human body.

At the center of this project is a bionic arm known as the "Luke Skywalker Arm" which allows individuals who have lost their natural arms the opportunity to not only to use their arm but also to experience the sense of touch again--even if it was presumed to be lost forever.

This project is not only revealing the fact that bionic limbs are now beginning to be incorporated into the nervous system, but also that our bodies are composed of a deeply encoded language that we are only just beginning to understand.

Clark explains that he became interested in the nervous system when he was in college. "[A] new understanding [of the nervous system] started to come along, and after I got interested in the nervous system, I got interested in ways to help fix problems with it ... We all have stories of people we know with one nervous system disorder or another. My mother had a stroke and she lost a lot of her motor capabilities and my stepmom had Parkinson's disease. These people are always in the back of my mind as I do my own work."

Clark extended his research into spinal cord injuries and prosthetics between 2004 and 2005 when he was approached by individuals hoping to use experimental medical techniques to help veterans injured in the Middle East. "Pretty much on the spot I said yes. We would just take our same device and our same approach and we'd flip it around in a certain way so what we used to record we would now stimulate and what we used to stimulate we'd now record. Instead of reanimating limbs that were paralyzed, we would instead be able to control limbs that aren't there by recording motor signal instead of stimulating motor signal."

THE BIONIC ARM YOU CAN CONTROL WITH YOUR THOUGHTS

University of Utah researchers are currently working with two local Utah companies, Ripple Neuro and Blackrock Microsystems, on the Luke Skywalker Arm--which was created by DEKA Research and Development in New Hampshire. Both companies focus on the creation of devices that are implanted into the human body...