Perhaps you were driving down the road one day, arm out the window, enjoying the day and you later found yourself waking up in a hospital in this situation. Bummer.

So if you had a really nice, prosthetic arm, how exactly are all those servo motors and other miracles of miniature mechanisms controlled?

One thing is almost a certainty, at least for this day and age, a 100% certainty. There are going to be electrodes somewhere in the system. To be effective, the electrodes must remain in electrical contact with those regions for which the electrode is responsible to provide a signal, always.

I have a friend who found his foot between a fence post and the bumper of a car. Now he doesn't feel his foot from mid calf on down. Walks with a sleepy foot gate. No wonder!

Now suppose there was a sock that he could put on, a CyberSock if you please, that restored the missing sensory feedback. Perhaps, he'll take up dancing again.

At days end, he takes off his CyberSock, and throws it into the wash. It has to be that way incidentally. Or, the disassembly, assembly of the cyber part of the sock has to be so fast and easy as to be trivial.

So, ... the CyberSpace Suit is an extension of the sock. Instead of transducing forces around the foot, the suit measures everything, everywhere. What holds all the various parts of the system together is the sock, a membrane with the body on one side and the world on the other.

Pictures to follow.

There is another membrane. The skin. We should expect that the realness of the sensation of the foot depends upon the expertise with which the peripheral nerves are stimulated by an implantable device, that communicates through the skin. Ultimately, the function of the sock is absorbed, becoming entirely implanted. But what of the condition when there is no foot and only a marvel of plastics, composites, and steel?