Experimental Surgery Aims to Revive a Paralyzed Limb
Connecting a Brain to a Chip
Case Western Reserve University
David Talbot | MIT Technology Review
A paralyzed man will receive experimental surgery connecting a brain chip to systems that activate muscles in his arm.
Doctors will attempt to reanimate a patient’s paralyzed arm with a pioneering surgery that involves capturing signals from his brain and restoring movement through a fine network of electronics linked to arm muscles.
The new effort will:
use the same technology to control the patient’s actual arm with a system called functional electrical stimulation (FES).
send signals to as many as 18 arm and hand muscles to allow the subject, who is paralyzed from the neck down, to perform tasks such as eating and nose-scratching.
use the brain itself to send these signals.
At the heart of the new device is the brain implant—a small probe four millimeters on each side with 96 hair-like electrodes that penetrate 1.5 millimeters into a portion of the motor cortex that controls arm movements.
The patient thinks ‘up and to the right,’ and we have a controller that actually figures out the correct muscle activations to move in that direction