The system can potentially be interfaced with several different advanced prosthetic hands that are currently being developed commercially or under government support. Jung has spent the last decade developing the prosthetic hand system with the assistance of a Bioengineering Research Partnership grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), specifically its National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB) and Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health & Human Development (NICHD).
"This research journey started from foundational neuroscience and engineering principles to incorporating with painstaking accuracy the validation needed to make this system ready for clinical studies and this first-in-human trial. This unique system, integrating the long-term efforts of academia and industry, is an example of the bioengineering partnerships we promote," said Grace Peng, Ph.D., Program Director at NIBIB.
The HAPTIX program of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which is an agency of the Department of Defense, is now supporting the first-in-human trial of the system. Florida International University, with Jung as principal investigator, will receive up to $2.2 million in support of this first-in-human trial.
The system and studies have been developed in collaboration with James Abbas, a professor at the School of Biological and Health Systems Engineering at Arizona State University. Industry partners include Cochlear Ltd (Australia), Motion Control, div. of Fillauer Companies, Inc. (Utah), Nikao Inc. (Florida) and clinical teams from the Miami Hand & Upper Extremity Institute (Florida) and Ortho Pro (Florida).
NOTE: Currently, the Neural Enabled Prosthetic Hand System (ANS-NEPH) is limited by federal (or United States) law to investigational use. The research is sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's (DARPA) Hand Proprioception and Touch Interfaces (HAPTIX) program and the Army Research Office (ARO) under Grant Number W911NF-17-1-0022."
SOURCE Florida International University
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