Revolutionary non-invasive brain implant restores mobility in paralysed patients
Read the original article: https://www.fanaticalfuturist.com/2018/07/revolutionary-brain-machine-interface-reverse-paralysis
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF: People with paralysis or nervous disorders could soon be regaining their movement thanks to a revolutionary new form of wireless brain machine interface.
Imagine if a tiny matchstick sized brain implant could circumvent damaged spinal cords and help paralysed people, and anyone for that matter with a neurological condition, like ALS Syndrome, which is also known as Locked In Syndrome because patients minds are basically locked into their immobile bodies, become mobile again using nothing else than the power of their thoughts.
The futuristic technology in question, whose ardent supporters include Barack Obama, is a tiny device containing a tangle of electrodes, and it’s already been shown to successfully record neural activity in sheep. Now though, thanks to a $10 Million injection of cash, the company behind the breakthrough tech, Synchron Medical, have announced they’ll be trialling the technology on five human volunteers as early as this September, according to Nick Opie, a biomedical engineer at the University of Melbourne and the Australian project’s CTO.
The so called “Stentrode” is designed to relay thoughts wirelessly to an external robotic device, such as an exoskeleton or prosthetic limb, to help paralysed people regain their mobility.
“Our aim is to return mobility, independence and communication to some of these men and women,” Opie said. “We are using the device to extract information that has already been generated by the brain and to bypass the damaged nerves.”
Other research groups have similar ideas. Neuralink, the startup co-founded by billionaire Elon Musk, is developing ultra-high bandwidth Brain Machine Interfaces (BMI) fashioned on a fancy piece of technology called the Neural Lace that wraps an atom thin sheath around a person’s brain to, in that case, help them connect with everything from prosthetic limbs to computers and Artificial Intelligence (AI) agents in the cloud. And not to be left out Facebook’s research unit Building 8 is working on other types of BMI devices to, on the one hand, turn Facebook into the world’s first telepathic social network, and on the other, let users send WhatsApp messages using just their mind. And you thought social media was crazy today…
In the Stentrode’s case it’s made of electrodes on an expandable mesh stent that’s inserted into a blood vessel atop the motor cortex, the part of the brain that controls movement, via a thin catheter inserted in the groin. Ouch. And once in position, the catheter is withdrawn, enabling the stentrode to expand against the vessel wall, creating a hollow, cigar-shaped wire tube that records brain activity.
Continue reading online... https://www.fanaticalfuturist.com/2018/07/revolutionary-brain-machine-interface-reverse-paralysis
Read the original article: https://www.fanaticalfuturist.com/2018/07/revolutionary-brain-machine-interface-reverse-paralysis
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF: People with paralysis or nervous disorders could soon be regaining their movement thanks to a revolutionary new form of wireless brain machine interface.
Imagine if a tiny matchstick sized brain implant could circumvent damaged spinal cords and help paralysed people, and anyone for that matter with a neurological condition, like ALS Syndrome, which is also known as Locked In Syndrome because patients minds are basically locked into their immobile bodies, become mobile again using nothing else than the power of their thoughts.
The futuristic technology in question, whose ardent supporters include Barack Obama, is a tiny device containing a tangle of electrodes, and it’s already been shown to successfully record neural activity in sheep. Now though, thanks to a $10 Million injection of cash, the company behind the breakthrough tech, Synchron Medical, have announced they’ll be trialling the technology on five human volunteers as early as this September, according to Nick Opie, a biomedical engineer at the University of Melbourne and the Australian project’s CTO.
The so called “Stentrode” is designed to relay thoughts wirelessly to an external robotic device, such as an exoskeleton or prosthetic limb, to help paralysed people regain their mobility.
“Our aim is to return mobility, independence and communication to some of these men and women,” Opie said. “We are using the device to extract information that has already been generated by the brain and to bypass the damaged nerves.”
Other research groups have similar ideas. Neuralink, the startup co-founded by billionaire Elon Musk, is developing ultra-high bandwidth Brain Machine Interfaces (BMI) fashioned on a fancy piece of technology called the Neural Lace that wraps an atom thin sheath around a person’s brain to, in that case, help them connect with everything from prosthetic limbs to computers and Artificial Intelligence (AI) agents in the cloud. And not to be left out Facebook’s research unit Building 8 is working on other types of BMI devices to, on the one hand, turn Facebook into the world’s first telepathic social network, and on the other, let users send WhatsApp messages using just their mind. And you thought social media was crazy today…
In the Stentrode’s case it’s made of electrodes on an expandable mesh stent that’s inserted into a blood vessel atop the motor cortex, the part of the brain that controls movement, via a thin catheter inserted in the groin. Ouch. And once in position, the catheter is withdrawn, enabling the stentrode to expand against the vessel wall, creating a hollow, cigar-shaped wire tube that records brain activity.
Continue reading online… https://www.fanaticalfuturist.com/2018/07/revolutionary-brain-machine-interface-reverse-paralysis
