Research from Dr. George, in collaboration with Dr. Clark, was recently featured in June Cover Story of National Geographic. The cover story, titled, "The Power of Touch," highlights several ongoing research studies that seek to restore the sense of touch to individuals who have lost it. The U's research on the "LUKE Arm" is among the research studies featured. An excerpt from the article is listed below:
..."I just wanted to see if I could pay it forward," said Keven Walgamott, a Utah real estate agent who lost parts of his right arm and foot two decades ago after a power line sparked while he was lifting a pump out of a well outside his home.
Starting in 2016, Walgamott spent more than a year as a research volunteer at the University of Utah, where he was temporarily implanted with electrodes, including some developed by scientists there. Inside their lab, wired into a computer, Walgamott would put on one of the new sensorized prostheses--this one named the LUKE, for Life Under Kinetic Evolution but also for Luke Skywalker, the Star Wars Jedi who loses his hand in a light-saber fight with Darth Vader. By the end of The Empire Strikes Back, Luke has a prosthetic that can apparently do everything, including feel. If you enter "Walgamott eggs" or "Walgamott grapes" into a search engine, you'll see him in a Utah lab with the LUKE: Concentrating, his face sober, he's performing the kind of simple tasks that are almost impossible for hands that can't feel.
He lifts a raw egg in its shell, with just the right delicacy, and sets it gently into a bowl. He holds a grape cluster with his actual hand, closes a prosthetic thumb and finger around a single grape, and pulls it off without squashing it...