A possible new therapy for paralysis involves transmitting neural signals from a neuroprosthetic device implanted in the brain to the motor nerves through a wireless relay. It will be years before this technology can be tested on humans. A researcher demonstrates a prototype for restoring locomotion using a brain prosthetic and wireless transmitter (The Japan Times)
Restoring movement after spinal injury to motor nerves has driven much research in recent years. Currently, exosuits are approaching market readiness for paralyzed people, which work by sending signals directly from the suit to the target nerves.
Another way to restore movement is currently being investigated by a collaboration of scientists in the U.S. and abroad, and involves a brain prosthetic and transmitter. It works similarly to the exoskeleton model, but there’s no suit strapped to your body. Instead, the prosthetic is implanted in your brain, and sends signals through a wireless transmitter to your nerves, by-stepping the damaged spinal cord. The device, called a “neuroprosthetic interface”, is essentially a microelectrode array which assesses signals from the motor cortex and transmits them to a wireless device. The wireless transmitter then sends these signals to motor nerves, allowing movement when you think about moving, which is what normally happens. Essential to the device working well is strong wireless decoding and transmitting. The team developed different neural maps of the brain and spinal cord, assessing areas of high activity that should be targeted when the body is paralyzed.
Targeting those ‘likely suspects’ is one part of the challenge, and then making sure that the signals are transmitted properly is the other half.Currently, the team has restored “near-normal” locomotion in several rhesus macaques. They damaged the animals’ spinal cords such that it would take several months for them to move again on their own. With the neural chip system, however, recovery was restored much faster. Within a couple of weeks, the macaques were walking, on treadmills and on the ground, almost as well as they had been before. But it wasn’t clear how much weight the monkeys would place on their paralyzed limbs, and how much other muscle groups were compensating. In addition, the wireless transmission doesn’t send signals from the motor nerves back to the brain, so the brain can’t ‘learn’ from movement. Could that obstacle one day be overcome in this device? Maybe. But don’t hold your breath. The principal investigator has warned that it could be years before the prosthetic is ready to test on people. But it’s definitely taken steps in the right direction. Read more about it here.
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