Within days of bringing home a prosthetic arm he controls with his thoughts, Avi Davidson was already making a tuna sandwich and holding his wife's hand — and actually feeling her hand back.

  • 9th participant overall to test the University of Utah's nerve-interfaced bionic arm
  • 1 year length of the first-ever at-home clinical trial, with a possible extension
  • 17 years since Davidson's accident led to the amputation of his left arm
  • 1st time this technology has moved outside a supervised lab setting

From lab-only testing to daily life

Alexander "Avi" Davidson lost his left arm below the elbow at age 16, after falling 35 feet from a telephone pole in an accident that also left him paralyzed from the waist down. Seventeen years later, he's the inaugural participant in a first-of-its-kind clinical trial: taking the University of Utah's Luke Skywalker-inspired bionic arm home, unsupervised, for an entire year.

The arm is powered by the BIOS Controller, a direct nerve interface developed at the Utah NeuroRobotics Lab. Implanted in the residual limb, it reads nerve signals to move the hand and sends signals back the other way — restoring a working sense of touch that earlier prosthetics couldn't offer.

What it actually feels like

Davidson described the return of sensation in his own words, and it's the kind of quote that explains why this trial matters more than the engineering specs alone.

"The ability to recognize how much pressure I'm putting on my wife's hand and to feel hers back in mine is a wild idea to internalize. This technology has the potential to reconnect so many individuals to a reality they did not believe possible."

According to the University of Utah's press release, Davidson was carrying out routine tasks — writing, playing cards, making food — within days of starting to use the device at home. Occupational therapist Leanne Seckinger, who has helped him integrate the arm into daily life, said the restored sensation "allows that access to do more things in a different context that wouldn't be possible with other prosthetic devices."

Why amputees still choose century-old technology

Despite decades of robotic prosthetic development, many amputees still prefer body-powered hooks — a design dating to the Civil War era — because robotic arms have historically been cumbersome to control. Direct nerve interfaces are built specifically to solve that problem by letting users operate the hand intuitively, through thought, rather than through awkward muscle-twitch triggers.

Jacob A. George, PhD, who has led development of the arm since 2015 and directs the Utah NeuroRobotics Lab, said the home trial is a turning point for the research itself. "Clinical trial participants are experiencing the world in a whole new way that really shapes and encourages our research and development," George said. "The goal is to ultimately transform the standard of life and quality of care for individuals with limb loss."

The device builds on DEKA's commercially available LUKE Arm hardware, paired with the BIOS nerve interface through a university spin-out company. It has already earned an FDA Breakthrough Devices designation, a fast-track status reserved for medical technology judged likely to offer major improvements over existing treatment. Davidson is the ninth person to work with Utah's interface research overall, but the first allowed to use it entirely on his own, away from the lab — a step George's team says is necessary before the technology can ever reach amputees more broadly.