robot that can be controlled by
paralyzed persons through thoughts
alone, a step they hope will one day
allow immobile people to interact with
their surroundings through so-called
avatars.
The team at Switzerland’s Federal
Institute of Technology in Lausanne
carried out their demonstration by
using only a simple head cap to record
the brain signals of Mark-Andre Duc (a
paralysed man), at a hospital in the
southern Swiss town of Sion.
Duc’s thoughts — or rather, the electrical
signals emitted by his brain when he
imagined lifting his paralyzed fingers —
were decoded almost instantly by a
laptop at the hospital. The resulting
instructions — left or right — were then
transmitted to a foot-tall robot scooting
around the Lausanne lab.
Besides making paraplegics mobile,
neuroprosthetics could be used to help
patients recover lost senses, researchers
said.
Professor Stephanie Lacour and her
team are working on an “electric skin”
for amputees, a glove fitted with tiny
sensors that would send information
directly to the user’s nervous system.
Eventually, researchers say they hope to
create mechanised prosthetics that are
as mobile and sensitive as a natural
hand, Lacour said.
Other researchers at Lausanne are
working on enabling paraplegics to
walk again with electrodes implanted in
their spinal cords.
“The goal is that after a year of training
with a robotic aide, the patient will be
able to walk without a robot. The
electrodes would stay implanted for life,”
said Professor Gregoire Courtine.
He said he is currently setting up clinical
trials and hopes to run tests at Zurich’s
university hospital within a year.
But the technology has its limits, the
brain signals can be scrambled if too
many people are gathered around a
wheelchair, for example.
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