Brain implant helps quadriplegic play Guitar Hero

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After Ian Burkhart broke his neck and lost all movement below his shoulders at age 19, his brain still told his hands how to move—but the messages couldn’t get through his severed spinal cord. Now, thanks to recent advances in electrical stimulation technology, Burkhart can once again grasp, pour, swipe a credit card, and even play Guitar Hero. To do so, he uses a microelectrode array that reads his brain’s signals and sends them through wires to a gel sleeve that electronically stimulates his muscles.

“This is the first time [stimulated movement has] been linked to signals recorded from within the brain,” says biomedical engineer Chad Bouton, one of the study’s authors and vice president of advanced engineering and technology at the Feinstein Institute for Medical Research in Manhasset, New York. “Now, the patient is able to control movements in his hand with his own thoughts.”

In the past, researchers have used several approaches to give paralyzed patients control of their hands. In some systems, researchers implanted sensors in shoulder muscles that patients could still control, allowing them to move one hand by contracting muscles in the opposite shoulder. Other systems have controlled hand movement using electroencephalography (EEG) brain recordings taken outside the scalp. Still other technologies use brain implants similar to those in the new study, but to control robotic arms, external skeletons, or computer cursors, rather than the patient’s own muscles. Never before has a paralyzed patient been able to precisely move his hand using the same neural signals that controlled his hand before his injury.

After implanting the microarray in Burkhart’s brain, researchers connected it to a computer equipped with a machine-learning algorithm, which they connected in turn to a polymer gel sleeve on Burke’s forearm. The sleeve has 130 electrodes that deliver signals to his muscles without penetrating the skin. Burkhart trained the system to connect patterns of neural signals to specific movements by repeatedly mirroring the movements of an imaginary hand on a computer screen.

...http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/04/brain-implant-helps-quadriplegic-play-guitar-hero

[Judi Lynn]

1. What a miracle this would be, bringing so much more freedom to paralyzed people. Wonderful. n/t