Quadriplegics Get Electronic Hand

The Food and Drug Administration approved the world’s first surgical implant to restore movement to a paralyzed limb Monday, an electronic hand that helps quadriplegics feed themselves, pour coffee, even write a letter.

NeuroControl Corp.’s implant offers hope to about 54,000 U.S. quadriplegics who retain some upper-body movement but cannot move their hands to perform the most basic of tasks. The Freehand’s implanted electrodes send electric impulses to muscles that force a paralyzed hand to move on command.

“Being able to grasp is very important for activities of daily life,” said FDA medical device chief Dr. Bruce Burlington. “It’s really clear that everybody got somewhat better and other patients got substantially better” in tests of the implant.

“I looked at this as a way to add more quality to my life,” said Eric Schremp of Sheffield Lake, Ohio, who was partially paralyzed in a 1992 diving accident and received the hand implant during a clinical trial last year.

“I can shave myself now. I attend college, I’m taking notes in school,” Schremp said. “Plus, it adds confidence that you’re able to pick up a glass in public, do normal things.”

The FDA says the $50,000 implant promises to be the first in a line of increasingly sophisticated devices to force paralyzed limbs to work again.

“You’ve seen Star Wars?” asked Dr. Dan Spiker, FDA’s deputy neurologic devices director, referring to the movie trilogy where Luke Skywalker gets a fully working hand transplant. This first prosthetic hand “is rudimentary compared to that. But that’s where we’re headed. … It’s exciting.”

Freehand won’t help the severely injured like actor Christopher Reeve, doctors cautioned. It is for quadriplegics who can still move their shoulders, a motion needed to operate the implant.

Today, quadriplegics get some help from external devices that let them type on computers by blowing into a mouthpiece or feed themselves with a fork strapped to a hand. Patients also try tendon and muscle transplants with very limited success.

The Freehand system, in contrast, is an electronic substitute for the brain’s nerve impulses that, because of spinal cord injury, can no longer signal the hand to move.

A surgeon implants a two-inch processor into the chest, threads electrodes under the skin down to the patient’s best hand and attaches them to hand muscles. Patients wear under their clothing on the opposite shoulder a small joystick. A jerk of the shoulder sends an electronic signal to the implant to tell the thumb to move toward the fingers in a pinching motion.

Tap a button on the chest with the arm, and the device forces the muscles into a more intricate movement to grasp a larger object like a cup.