'Neural Bypass' Links Brain To Hand To Get Around Paralysis (ieee.org)

An anonymous reader writes: People who are paralyzed from a spinal cord injury still generate movement commands in their brains, but those commands can't travel down their spinal cords and peripheral nerves to reach their muscles. So biomedical engineers came up with a "neural bypass" to route brain signals around the roadblock. The system has just been demonstrated by a human patient for the first time. The patient has a brain implant to record signals from his motor cortex which are sent to a computer, where a decoder algorithm figures out which signals correspond to which specific imagined movements. It then sends a command to a sleeve of electrodes the patient wears on his forearm, which stimulates his muscles in precise patterns to produce the desired hand movement. The patient has already poured from a bottle, stirred with a swizzle stick, swiped a credit card, and played Guitar Hero.

Comments

Re:Temporary Hope?

[gweihir]

Do not mistake this for a finished product. The main concern is that the implanted electrodes have a limited lifetime. It has gotten better, but it is still nowhere near "permanent". One of the motivation for such experiments is to find the minimal intrusiveness for the implanted electrodes that still allows them to record the signals with the required accuracy. Expect at least 10 more years and possibly much longer before the electrodes become long-term usable.