Crazy tech advancements! Two stroke victims are able to communicate and control items with a robotic arm which receives commands from their mind! Hit the jump to check out this great advancement.
Paralyzed Lady Controls Robotic Arm With Her Mind!
Two stroke victims unable to move or speak can now control a robotic arm with their minds.
By thinking about moving her own paralyzed arm, one woman in the experiment used an artificial limb to serve herself coffee for the first time in 15 years. It’s the most complex task yet achieved with a brain-computer interface.
“When the woman with the brain stem stroke reached out for that thermos of coffee and put it to her mouth and then she put it back down, the smile on her face was remarkable,†said Brown University neurologist and engineer Leigh Hochberg, who led the study published May 16 in Nature.
Hochberg directs the BrainGate2 clinical trial, an ongoing test of the BrainGate system. With a 4-millimeter-wide, brain-implanted chip as its centerpiece, the system conducts signals from motion-controlling neurons to a computer that decodes the signals and turns them into software commands.
After years of experiments on monkeys, surgeons implanted the 100-electrode sensor in a human volunteer’s motor cortex in 2004. The volunteer, a 25-year-old man named Matt Nagle, was paralyzed from the neck down. Nobody knew if the part of his brain that once controlled voluntary physical motion could still generate intelligible signals.
But when Nagle moved a computer cursor by thinking, it was apparent his motor neurons still worked. Since then, paralyzed people have used BrainGate to open and close a robotic hand. Other research teams found that monkeys with brain implants can feel with a virtual arm and feed themselves snacks with a real robotic arm.
In an earlier stage of the trial, the same woman used BrainGate to control an iPod, but the latest phase in the research marks the first time a human has used a brain-computer interface system to manipulate a physical object in three-dimensional space.
To map neural activity to the robotic arm’s movement, Hochberg’s team moved the arm while asking the participants to imagine themselves controlling it. After those readings were used to calibrate the system, participants’ thought patterns produced corresponding arm movements.
Both of the participants had paralyzing strokes long before receiving their implants, and Hochberg said it’s encouraging to learn their motor signals were still useful. For the woman who served herself coffee, the implant is still working after five years — the longest anyone has had such an implant.
The feat is “a big step†up from previous demonstrations in monkeys, which were able-bodied and still controlled their arms, said Andrew Jackson, a neuroscientist at Newcastle University who was not involved in the research. “It’s not guaranteed that it would work in a patient, particularly a patient who had a stroke.â€
Eventually the researchers hope to make the system smaller, wireless and stable enough that people with brain injuries and physical disorders can use it around the clock to control devices and communicate. Participants currently operate the arm in their homes, but technicians always calibrate it in advance.
Hochberg said his dream, still many years away on the horizon, is not only for paralyzed people to use BrainGate to control devices, but to reroute neural signals back into their limbs, allowing them to again control their bodies.
Hochberg emphasized that the participants deserve credit for “their time, their dedication and their feedback in developing a device we hope will help other people with paralysis or limb loss in the future.â€
The research was funded in part by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which hopes the insights can be applied to developing prosthetics for wounded veterans.
