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posted by janrinok on Sunday April 26 2020, @10:25AM   Printer-friendly
from the giving-a-hand dept.

BCI system gives paralyzed man back his sense of touch with haptic feedback:

Ian Burkhart, now 28, had a diving accident in 2010 that severely damaged his spinal cord, leaving him paralyzed and confined to a wheelchair, with only limited movement in his elbow and shoulders. Thanks to an implanted brain-computer-interface (BCI) developed by Battelle, he has made significant progress over the last six years in restoring small movements; he's even able to play Guitar Hero again. And now Battelle scientists have succeeded in restoring his sense of touch, according to a new paper in the journal Cell.

BCIs are a booming R&D field, with startups like Elon Musk's Neuralink looking ahead to a world where human beings will connect directly to their computers with either external devices (similar in function to an EEG) or biologically compatible implanted BCIs. Such systems require a way to record neural activity (electrode sensors), a way to transmit those signals (like a small wireless chipset), and algorithms that can translate those signals into action. BCIs are already a medical reality for patients with spinal cord injuries, like Burkhart, or those who suffer from Parkinson's or epileptic seizures. The benefits patients gain far outweigh the risks of surgical implantation.

Over the past 90 years or so, Battelle has been instrumental in developing such prominent technologies as the Xerox machine, cruise control, and CD-ROMs, along with numerous medical devices. Patrick Ganzer, lead author on the new Cell paper, is a research scientist with the organization's medical devices division, working with the NeuroLife group to develop a BCI for clinical trial. Burkhart has been working with Ganzer and NeuroLife since 2014 to restore motor function to his right arm.

Battelle's "neural bypass system" has three primary components, according to Ganzer. The first is the surgically implanted chip, placed in an area of the brain that responds to thoughts of movement. Next, the system must take the brain wave and brain signal recordings and decode what movements the patient (in this case, Burkhart) is thinking about. "If I want to open my hand, or close my hand, those look like different activity patterns in the brain," Ganzer told Ars. Finally, the system translates thoughts into stimulations of muscles on the arm, resulting in movement.

[...] Despite the paralysis, Ganzer and his team discovered that when they stimulated his skin, neural signals were still reaching his brain—a phenomenon known as sub-perceptual brain activity—they were just too weak for the brain to perceive them. That means Burkhart still has a few functioning nerve fibers in his arm.

So the Battelle team set about figuring out how to amplify that tiny signal with haptic feedback, like the vibrations of a mobile phone or game controller. Their system uses electrodes on the skin connected to wires that bypass the spinal cord and send those sub-perceptual touch signals to and from the BCI implanted in his motor cortex. A band of vibrational motors on Burkhart's upper arm provides the sensory haptic feedback.

[...] Ganzer and his team are hopeful that others with spinal cord injuries might also benefit from their system, especially since Burkhart's injury is so severe. "This sub-perceptual touch signal is present in many patients," he said. "It's likely others may have a less severe injury and therefore more spare nerve fiber tissue."

DOI: Cell, 2020. 10.1016/j.cell.2020.03.054 (About DOIs).


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  • (Score: 3, Funny) by JoeMerchant on Sunday April 26 2020, @01:10PM

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Sunday April 26 2020, @01:10PM (#987275)

    Sorry, just got a visual of a subdural mechanical haptic feedback system gone awry, overly vibrating the brain...

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