Brain Implant Helps Restore Movement for Paralyzed Patient, Researchers Say

There is a new tiny device that can be implanted in the motor cortex that allows man with quadriplegia to make intricate movements. Isn't this amazing? Scientists are breaking ground immensely in a decades long effort to restore movement to people with spinal-cord injuries.

A quadriplegic patient called Ian Burkhart,24, wasn't always quadriplegic he became quadriplegic five years ago after a diving accident. After the accident messages from his brain to his limbs couldn't get to other parts of his body due to damage in his spinal cord.

How does this thing work you may ask? Researchers from Ohio State University implanted a tiny device in Burkhart's motor cortex, the part of the brain that controls movement. The device acts as  a neural bypass, picking up the brain signals and sending them to a computer that decodes them. He imagines the movement, the brain signal is transmitted and decoded and the electrical stimulation is delivered to the muscles using a sleeve embedded with electrodes that wraps around his arm. He was able to grasp a bottle, and picking up a stick while stirring the contents in a jar.

Spinal- cord injuries affect approximately 150,000 people in the U.S. and not all of them are elegible to use such a device. While they discovered all this and so many people need help they actually lack funds to keep going with this research. It has actually been a challenge for the university to find successful business models to commercialize brain-computer technology, even when experiments demonstrate the difference restoring function can make in peoples lives.

I think that that is preposterous since the results show that the experiment does work. But I guess business man want results now and it will be a long time for such treatments to be available and affordable for everyone to use.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/brain-implant-helps-restore-movement-for-paralyzed-patient-researchers-say-1460566801