Video: Young man becomes first patient to wiggle robot arm's artificial fingers using power of thought

He was able to move the thumb, index, middle, ring and pinkie digits individually and independently of each other - giving hope to millions of accident victims, stroke sufferers and amputees of a new bionic era of movement.

Although not missing an arm - or paralysed - himself the unnamed volunteer was an epileptic who had been fitted with 128 electrodes in his brain to pinpoint the origin of his seizures. So the researchers used these to map the parts responsible for moving each finger - with buzzers in a vibrating glove collecting the electrical activity data. The prosthetic arm was programmed to respond to this - meaning the man only had to think about moving any finger for it to respond accordingly.