Virtual arms controlled by monkeys show a bright future for paraplegics

In something that almost sound like a basis for a terrible SyFy movie neurobiology professor Miguel Nicolelis, and his team at Duke Researchers, have succeed in advancing exoskeleton science forward by a major discovery.

They have devised a method by which monkeys, as the testing precursor to humans, are able to control a virtual arm with nothing more than their minds. While similar things have been done in the past Nicolelis and his team have gone that extra step and found a way to provide real-time sensory feedback.

Other techniques make use of electrode implants to stimulate brain activity but current methods result in confusion when a patient’s brain receives signals to and from the prosthetic arm.

With the method discovered by Nicolelis they have a new type of interface that can read and transmit brain signals to an artificial limb before almost instantly switching to a receptive mode.

The monkeys that were used to test this new interface had one set of electrodes placed in the motor cortex area and the second implanted in their brain’s sensory region. After the implanting of the electrodes they trained the monkeys to look at three identical objects on the computer screen and then to “touch” the objects with the “virtual arm”.

This action was controlled by signals sent from the brain electrodes and when the one object that had what they called “virtual texture” was touched a sensory signal would be sent back to the monkey’s brain.

The results of the testing were so good that the scientists are now embedding their technology into a full body exoskeleton and hope to soon start human trials.

via Engadget.