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Implants could help paralysed people walk “by thinking”

A team of researchers is developing a revolutionary bionic brain implant to help paralysed people control a robotic exoskeleton just by thinking about it. The…

A team of researchers is developing a revolutionary bionic brain implant to help paralysed people control a robotic exoskeleton just by thinking about it.
The team is hoping to test the matchstick-sized stent electrode, or “stentrode,” in a group of paralysed patients with spinal cord injuries in 2017.
The device is inserted via a blood vessel and is deposited in a blood vessel next to the motor cortex – the part of the brain that generates signals that control movement – bypassing the need for complex brain surgery.
The brain-machine interface is not dissimilar to the idea of a heart pacemaker, in that it interacts electrically with tissue using sensors inserted into a vein, except the vein is inside the brain.
The medical innovation is the work of 39 scientists, researchers and engineers from 16 departments at the University of Melbourne in Australia, who report their work so far in a paper published in the journal Nature Biotechnology.
First author and neurologist Dr. Thomas Oxley, who among other things heads the multi-disciplinary vascular bionics lab at Melbourne, says: “We have been able to create the world’s only minimally invasive device that is implanted into a blood vessel in the brain via a simple day procedure, avoiding the need for high-risk open brain surgery.”
Their goal is to help completely paralysed patients regain mobility by recording their brain activity and converting those signals into electrical commands that control exoskeletons and prosthetic limbs.
“In essence this is a bionic spinal cord,” explains Dr. Oxley.
The signals could also be used to control wheelchairs and computers, say the researchers.

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