A team of international researchers said that while advances have been made to make prosthetic hands and fingers look real in terms of replicating anatomical structure, skin tone, pores, and hair, they still feel artificial, and social touching for prosthetic hands has been a neglected area of research. Toward that end, the research team has demonstrated that the touch from a warm and soft rubber hand can be perceived by another person as if the touch were coming from a human hand. The results were published September 29 in the open access journal IEEE Transactions on Neural Systems and Rehabilitation Engineering.
