Recent technological advances have opened new possibilities for the development of assistive and medical tools, including prosthetic limbs. While these limbs used to be hard objects with the same shape as limbs, prosthetics are now softer and look more realistic, with some also integrating robotic components that considerably broaden their functions.

Despite these developments, most commercially available robotic limbs cannot be easily and intuitively controlled by users. This significantly limits their effectiveness and the extent to which they can improve people’s quality of life.

Researchers at the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT) and Imperial College London recently developed a new soft prosthetic hand that could be easier for users to control. This system, presented in a Science Robotics paper, leverages a new control approach that integrates the coordination patterns of multiple fingers (i.e., postural synergies) with the decoding of the activity of motoneurons in people’s spinal column.