IAN BURKHART HAS been a cyborg for two years now. In 2014, scientists at Ohio State’s Neurological Institute implanted a pea-sized microchip into the 24-year-old quadriplegic’s motor cortex. Its goal: to bypass his damaged spinal cord and, with the help of a signal decoder and electrode-packed sleeve, control his right arm with his thoughts…
Over the past 15 months, researchers at the Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center and engineers from Battelle, the medical group that developed the decoder software and electrode sleeve, have helped Burkhart relearn fine motor skills with weekly training sessions. In a paper in Nature, they describe hooking a cable from the port screwed into Burkhart’s skull (where the chip is) to a computer that translates the brain signals into instructions for the sleeve, which stimulates his muscles into moving his wrist and fingers.
via Wired
