The branches · The link to machines · could move a stage within 1 to 5 years
A brain implant gives a person touch from a robotic hand
Signals going the other way: pressure sensors on a robotic hand's fingers drive tiny currents into the part of the brain that feels the hand, and a paralysed man feels his own fingers being touched when the robot's are. Reported in 2016, it closed the loop between brain and machine for the first time in a person, and made the robotic arm he already controlled by thought much faster to use.
What would count
A person with paralysis, through electrodes implanted in the touch area of the brain, reports pressure on a specific finger when the matching finger of a robotic hand is touched, at a rate reliably better than chance, in a peer-reviewed report.
Who settles it: Peer-reviewed reports of the implanted volunteers
Where it stands
First human. Reached on 13 October 2016, on the record of doi.org. Could move a stage within 1 to 5 years.
What it rests on
Needs a first human of: A wired brain implant lets a paralysed person control a cursor.
The last reading
Once a week every upgrade is read against the news, against what would count above. Open a line to see what that week held. Every reading of this upgrade is on this week's reading.
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16 October 2026 Nothing new
Nothing in the window. The nearest work is the Chalmers and Chicago report in Science of patterned stimulation giving a bionic hand's user edges, curvature and motion (2025), on the rung this entry already holds. On the claim still to check, whether the 2016 Pittsburgh paper itself includes touch triggered by the robotic hand: its abstract (PubMed 27738096) describes sensations evoked by stimulation 'perceived as originating from locations on the hand' and graded by amplitude, and does not mention the robotic hand's sensors; the full text would not load, and the 2016 coverage describing the volunteer naming which prosthetic finger was touched comes from the university's release. Not settled; the claim stays on the list.
Notes
The record is the 2016 Pittsburgh report of a man with a spinal cord injury feeling touch on his fingers through stimulation of his brain. The animal record is the 2011 Duke report of monkeys feeling the texture of virtual objects through the same kind of stimulation. The prosthetic-arm version of this idea, with the touch fed into the nerves of the arm rather than the brain, is a separate entry on the Movement and body branch.