ONLY ON 7: Bay Area researchers give sense of touch back to injured combat vets

LIVERMORE, Calif. (KGO) -- Better medical care on the battlefield means more of America's wounded warriors are making it home, but for those who've been seriously injured, life can be drastically different.

Bay Area researchers are helping those who've lost a hand or an arm feel like they're whole again.

In a video from the University of Pittsburgh, a man who's totally paralyzed controls a lifelike robotic arm using only his brain.

"It'd be really nice to scoop something up on a spoon and feed myself again," said the man in the video. "Reaching out and touching my girlfriend for the first time and holding her, holding her hand."

It's research funded by The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) -- the federal agency credited with the birth of the Internet and the RADAR-defying stealth fighter.

But there's something missing from that robotic arm.

"Unfortunately, you can't feel what you're touching, and so it actually feels more like an instrument than part of the human body," said Satinderpall Pannu, a researcher with the Lawrence Livermore Nation

And that's where a new project comes in. In a video from Case Western professor Dustin Tyler, a man with a prosthetic hand is asked to pluck the stems from cherries and fails nine out of 15 times.

"Some of them felt like I might have squished them, but I wasn't sure," said the man in the video.

But then, they repeated the experiment enabling a tiny circuit implanted in his arm. It sent tiny signals that let him experience a sense of touch from the artificial hand.

Out of fifteen cherries, he only damaged one.

It was such a success, DARPA's now tapped the Lawrence Livermore National Lab to bring this to wounded veterans.

"To really restore a natural sensation, and the sense of actually having your hand back," Pannu said.

Making parts to go inside the body requires an unimaginable degree of precision and an almost unthinkable degree of cleanliness. This is the same sort of clean room where computer chips are made. In fact, the parts are fabricated using some of the same methods.

"If you got one hair on there, you've destroyed the entire thing," said one lab worker.

In fact, a hair is 10 times thicker than these tiny electrodes made so thin, because it's easier for the body to accept.

They attach one to each of the three main nerves that normally control the hand and they'll use a short range radio to connect those to the artificial hand. It is the stuff of science fiction.

"In 'Star Wars,' Luke Skywalker was able to get that prosthetic back on and he couldn't tell the difference," Pannu said.

The technology of Jedi warriors brought to life for America's warriors.