A cutting-edge implant has allowed a man to feel and move his hand again after a spinal cord injury left him partially paralyzed, Wired reports.

According to a press release, it’s the first time both motor function and sense of touch have been restored using a brain-computer interface (BCI), as described in a paper published in the journal Cell.

After severing his spinal cord a decade ago, Ian Burkhart had a BCI developed by researchers at Battelle, a private nonprofit specializing in medical tech, implanted in his brain in 2014.

The injury completely disconnected the electrical signals going from Burkhart’s brain to his hands, through the spinal cord. But the researchers figured they could skip the spinal cord to hook up Burkhart’s primary motor cortex to his hands through a relay.

A port in the back of his skull sends signals to a computer. Special software decodes the signals and splits them between signals corresponding to motion and touch respectively. Both of these signals are then sent out to a sleeve of electrodes around Burkhart’s forearm.

But making sense of these signals is extremely difficult.

“We’re separating thoughts that […]