IEEE Spectrum: New Brain-Machine Interface Reactivates Monkey's Paralyzed Muscles

I just noticed this in the October issue of the IEEE Spectrum: New Brain-Machine Interface Reactivates Monkey's Paralyzed Muscles.

Though it will be years before spinal bypass surgery reaches even the clinical-experiment stage, researchers at the University of Washington (UW) and the Washington National Primate Research Center, both in Seattle, have figured out a way to get macaque monkeys in their lab to manipulate temporarily paralyzed muscles in their arms using brain-controlled electrical stimulation. In research reported last week in Nature, they describe what happened when they attached electrodes to neurons in a monkey’s motor cortex—the part of the brain that controls voluntary movement—and used fairly simple algorithms to translate activity in these cortical cells into electrical signals that tell muscles when, how much, and how forcefully to contract.

This is very encouraging news on a number of fronts. Of course it is good news for spinal trauma patients and patients suffering from degenerative structural nervous system disorders. But it also potentially bodes well for some unusual types human-computer interfaces.

Picture the scenario described above, but with the downstream actuator side of the circuit embedded in the body of someone other than the person whose brain is generating the signal. Imagine a surgeon teaching a surgical resident a very tricky procedure, and able to guide the resident's hand just as she would her own. Although the stimuli are coming from the outside, I'd bet that the resident's nervous system would retain the "muscle memory" of the surgeon-guided actions, aiding the buildup of tacit knowledge that characterizes expertise.

That's the first outside-the-box use that's occurred to me in a few minutes of reading and thought, but this is outside my current scope of activity (darn it!). I'll bet many other and better ideas will arise in the fertile minds of the biomedical engineering community as this unfolds.