Reach out and touch someone — literally.
A breakthrough medical device in a position to simulate the “natural,” “real-life” sensation of human touch is being offered up as a cure for isolation — and will allow family members to benefit from the sensation of physical contact, even in the event that they’re continents apart.
Researchers at University College London (UCL) have created the wearable technology — a small silicon fingertip connector called an progressive bio-inspired haptic system (BAMH) — to pair with a small machine that uses vibrations to stimulate nerve cells, The Independent reported.
Researcher Dr. Sara Abad explained how the device could also be used to offer the feeling of hand-holding for distant embrace, “incorporating touch into our virtual social interactions.”
“For example, with the pandemic and globalization, it’s very likely that you’ve family that will not be living in the identical town as you,” Abad said. “For social bonding, which is significant, you wish touch, but video calls don’t provide that.”
While 4 key stimuli nerve cells might be activated to offer a user a “realistic sense of touch,” there are other fascinating potential uses for the technology as well.
In robot-aided surgeries, for instance, BAMH can scan and analyze in the event that they are working with skin tissue showing indications of cancer. It could possibly even be utilized in the treatment of metacarpal tunnel syndrome as well. It could also sooner or later be used to handle radioactive material from a distance.
Up next, researchers need to expand their experimentation group in a clinical trial — all to learn more about how people may lose their feeling of touch over time.
The researchers need to recruit a minimum of 10 people experiencing lack of sensation for a clinical trial in the following few months to know more about how the sense of touch degrades over time.
“We would like to know [if] can we detect, over a while a degradation in [touch] sensitivity,” said Professor Helge Wurdemann.
“After which we would like to feed that data back to the clinician to then understand in the event that they can, possibly adopt their therapy with a purpose to decelerate the loss in (touch) perception.”
