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Paralysis used to mean a life sentence of immobility with no way out, until now.
In 2010 Ian Burkhart suffered a devastating injury that would leave him paralyzed. Although he could still move his shoulders and elbows, he had lost the feeling in his hands. That was until Patrick Ganzer of the Battelle Memorial Institute advanced biotechnology into the future by developing a brain implant that would change Burkhart’s life. When the implant connects to a specialized brain-computer interface, it does something that has never been done before and has restored both movement and touch in your right hand.
“Paralyzed muscles can be resuscitated after a spinal cord injury (SCI) using a brain-computer interface (BCI) to improve motor function alone,” Ganzer and his research team said in a study recently published in Cell. “It is important to note that the sense of touch is a key component of motor function.”
The implant and BCI not only brought Burkhart’s sense of touch back, but also allowed him to do things like swipe a credit card and play games. Guitar Hero again. Ganzer was able to do this by harnessing the potential of residual tactile signaling in Burkhart’s hand. These were brain contact signals that were so weak that Burkhart could not perceive them otherwise. Severe spinal cord injuries were supposed to eliminate all transmission of sensory information to the skin, but when a patient touches that they cannot feel, the stimuli cause changes in brain activity. Some somatosensory nerve fibers (which send information to objects in our environment through touch) are now believed to survive even what is considered clinically complete spinal cord injury.
Reliving sensation in the hand is particularly difficult, because with a spinal cord injury as damaging as Burkhart’s, the systems that convert sensation to signals reaching the brain have been so affected that tactile signaling is often blocked . So how did Ganzer do it? He used a “tactile decoder” that amplified those weak residual signals to the point that Burkhart was aware of them. The BCI recorded Burkhart’s brain activity using information from his implant (which was already capable of detecting weak sensory signals associated with touch), then sent that information to a processor, the tactile decoder, which translates the stimulus signals into movements. . The information travels to a band around the forearm that uses electricity to boost the signal and make the muscles in your hands move again. The band vibrates when sensory information reaches the hand.
“Sensory function can potentially be increased using a BCI that can decipher the residual sensory neural activity of the affected hand and dynamically translate this into … sensory feedback that the user can perceive,” Ganzer said. “The sense of touch is critical for multiple aspects of motor control. Beyond restoring the sense of touch alone, a BCI can restore sensory and motor function simultaneously in patients with SCI, even while participants use their own hands. ”
The function Burkhart had left on his elbows and shoulders helped guide hand movements, but it would not have worked much without the brain implant and decoder. His brain implant had been designed only to control movement when it was first inserted. That already sounds futuristic. Because the sensory and motor areas of your brain overlap, you can team up with the BCI so you can experience what it’s like to touch things again. As if that wasn’t surprising enough, it’s almost as if the BCI thinks for itself. It can detect different levels of touch and adjust the tactile force required for a particular object, so Burkhart automatically uses the correct amount of pressure to grip something. He has mastered about 20 handshakes so far.
“In the future, we hope that this set of findings will allow patients with an implanted BCI to maximize the information encoded in the recorded neural activity to obtain functional gains,” said Ganzer.
Could this type of technology eventually make paralysis a thing of the past? You never know what could come when every morning is the future.
(via Cell)
