This is a headline from October 13, 2003, almost exactly 8 years ago:
Monkeys Control Robotic Arm With Brain Implants. Very cool story showcasing huge upside for neuro-control. The little primates moved a robotic arm, using their thoughts. Said reporter Rick Weiss, “The technology could someday allow people with paralyzing spinal cord injuries to operate machines or tools with their thoughts as naturally as others today do with their hands.”
Jump to this week, an article in the Huffington Post from October 10, 2011:
Paralyzed Man Uses Mind-Powered Robot Arm To Touch. Another cool story, with a tearful emotional angle no one might have anticipated. A guy named Tim Hemmes, age 30, seven years post quadriplegia, moved a robotic arm to reach out to the hand of his girlfriend. “It wasn't my arm but it was my brain, my thoughts. I was moving something,” Hemmes says. “I don’t have one single word to give you what I felt at that moment. That word doesn’t exist.”
This research comes from the team in Pittsburgh, Cal Tech and other places working on the DARPA arm we discussed
a few months back.
From the Huff Post article:
The goal is a Star Trek-like melding of mind and machine, combining what's considered the most human-like bionic arm to date – even the fingers bend like real ones – with tiny chips implanted in the brain. Those electrodes tap into electrical signals from brain cells that command movement. Bypassing a broken spinal cord, they relay those signals to the robotic third arm.
Are we there yet? Can we re-arm the tetraplegics? In short, no. Not yet. But there has been a lot of progress. The one of the biggest challenges is the actual hook-up in the brain. There are safety issues, as well as basic functional concerns. Hemme’s surgeons implanted a chip that, per the FDA safety concerns, had to be removed after a month.
From the article:
Until now, researchers mostly have tested miniature electrodes that poke inside the brain's motor cortex and record from individual cells, presumably allowing for precise movements. Pittsburgh's next test-patient will have two penetrating grids implanted in different parts of the cortex for a year to record from 200 cells altogether.
In contrast, Hemmes' chip sat on the surface of his motor cortex, a less invasive method that records from groups of cells. The size of two postage stamps, it's based on a kind of electrical signal mapping used to track seizures in epilepsy patients.
Here’s another issue: being able to sense what the robotic arm touches. Coincidentally, this notion made news just last week.
Again, from the Huff Post:
Sure, a robotic hand that one day mounts to a wheelchair could be useful. But no matter how well today's prosthetics move, they've got a problem: They don't sense what they touch. Normally, instant messages flash from the skin up to the brain to say "squeeze tighter" so we don't drop that coffee cup, or "tight enough" so we don't hug too hard.
Besides, Hemmes shares the dream of many quadriplegics. He doesn't want a bionic third hand. He wants to move his own hands again.
"These are all scientific goals that are very real," [principal investigator] Mike Boninger says.
Recreating sensation means crafting a two-way highway with those brain chips. That's what Duke University, in a study published last week in the journal Nature, did with its two monkeys. When the animals "touched" objects on a computer screen with their video game-like arms, electrical signals flashed back up to implanted electrodes – different signals for different textures, to tell the objects apart.
To be sure, the research at Duke is quite remarkable, adding an important tactile dimension to the brain-machine interface. In a first-ever experiment, primates moved and felt objects on a computer screen using only thought.
Here’s a piece that ran in
Scientific American, another in
Nature, and the Nature
abstract.
From SA:
If the technology works in people, it promises to make quite a difference to paralyzed patients. They would not only be able to walk and move their arms and hands, says [researcher] Miguel Nicolelis, but also to feel the texture of objects they hold or touch, and sense the terrain they walk on. "You cannot produce motor behavior without tactile feedback from the environment," he says.
Give Nicolelis an advance degree in dreaming big:
He is a founder of the Walk Again Project, an international collaboration whose goal is to develop the first brain–machine interface that will give paralyzed patients full mobility through a "wearable robot." Think: Iron Man, a full-body exoskeleton-like prosthetic, the interface controlled by neural implants that capture signals from the motor cortex to move legs, hands, fingers and everything else as well as be studded with sensors that relay tactile information about the outside world to the somatosensory cortex. Buoyed by the advances so far, Nicolelis predicts that the device will be ready to debut in 2014; his team plans to unveil it at the opening game of soccer's World Cup in Brazil that June. "It's our moon shot," he says.
