Brain-Controlled Prosthetics Are Giving Disabled Persons Robotic Limbs
Erik Sorto made headlines last May after drinking a beer.
Paralyzed from the neck down after being shot 13 years ago, he relies on others to carry out his daily actions. So serving himself his own drink was a major personal victory. For a team of scientists, it marked a promising step forward in using the imagination to control machines.
Moving Objects with Thoughts
In 2013, Sorto became the first person in the world to have a neural prosthetic implanted in the posterior parietal cortex — a part of the brain that plays a significant role in planned actions and in the formation of goals and intentions. A report in the journal Science details the significance of the implant.
His implant consists of two small silicon chips containing 96 microscopic electrodes. They record the firing patterns of about 100 nerve cells simultaneously, and this data moves a computer cursor that operates a robotic arm.
By imagining whirling his arms like a windmill, the image triggered the prosthetic to move Erik’s beer toward him so he could take a sip.
Developed by the University of Utah, the chips have been approved for commercial use in humans by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
In previous studies of neural prosthetics, researchers had instead implanted chips into regions of the brain tightly linked with movement, including the primary motor cortex.
The hope is the new approach will produce smoother movements, and perhaps prompt electrodes to be implanted into both areas of the brain at once. However, it’s unclear at this time whether the strategy will lead to better results.
Remapping Nerves
Les Baugh, a 59-year-old who lost both arms after running into power lines as a teenager, is taking advantage of similar technology to control robotic arms. He’s testing a prosthetic developed at Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory.
In addition to using brain signals to operate prosthetics, engineers have remapped nerves that would normally control the hands, wrists, elbows, and shoulders.
With targeted muscle reinnervation, a cutting-edge surgery that reassigns nerves, they’ve taken these free nerve endings and moved them to Baugh’s remaining muscle groups.
Fitted with the robotic arms, Baugh can open the hands and lift the limbs just by thinking about the actions. As the remapped nerves grow deeper, it’s possible that Baugh will feel sensation in the prosthetics. Other amputees who are also testing the technology have already reported feeling texture.
However, Baugh must wait before he can take the robotic arms home. They are not yet approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and must undergo a clinical trial. The price is also prohibitive, each one costing about $500,000, although the price is expected to drop for a consumer version.
Still, Baugh regularly visualizes using them, so he’ll be ready if and when they become commercially available. In his daily life, he relies largely on his mouth to carry out tasks like preparing food and turning on the radio. More dangerous ones include lighting fires and closing the door to his wood-burning stove.
New limbs will be a welcome change.
“Everyday is a new challenge; there’s always something else coming up. I gotta face something I’ve never faced before it seems like every day,” Baugh said in The New York Times video series Robotica.
“I mean, yeah, there’s a lot of stuff that I can do, but there’s still a lot in the background I can’t do.”
For Baugh, the thought-controlled prosthetics could mean breaking his dependence on other people and becoming complete in his mind.
“It’s not so much robotic as basically more back to human — being a whole person instead of having pieces missing. And not having to ask somebody, ‘Hey can you grab this for me? Can you put this in my cart? I can’t get it off the shelf.’”
Image source: JHU Applied Physics Laboratory
This article was originally published as part of the “Health Technology and the Future” series on Beacon Reader.
Originally published at TechAble World.
