Paralyzed Woman Controls Robotic Arm With Her Mind

This is an area where hackers can really make an impact.

We tend to forget how necessary movement and control is for our daily routines. There are people out there who even lack the ability to turn on|off the TV. A little hacking with an arduino, and some buttons will make it possible for them.

In hackaday.com, one consistently sees hacks that are for the disabled. Special game controllers for people missing an arm, or some other limb are popular and simple to re-create.

I do have a personal anecdote.

I was once buying some resistors on the local radio shack. While I looked in the mess of tiny plastic bags, another person started to browse for electronic bits. I started to talk to him, and found out he was a doctor. His work was in dealing with disabled people. He had learned how to work with embedded electronics and fiber composites in order to build prosthetic limbs for impoverished patients.

Just amazing.

I know I know, it's not good etiquette here to make short, emotional comments, but -

By thinking about moving her own paralyzed arm, one woman in the experiment used an artificial limb to serve herself coffee for the first time in 15 years.

Seeing her smile at the end of that video just made my otherwise terrible day rather special. And it's such great validation for the team that's working on this technology, I hope they continue to see much success in the future.

Disclaimer: I work in a similar lab (my adviser was advised by the senior author on the paper, who runs the lab) on a brain-machine interface project funded by DARPA.

What makes this awesome from a scientific point of view:

1) 2-dimensional decoders, where an individual controls a mouse with their mind, have existed for a while. What makes this really cool is that there are actually quite a few degrees of freedom in a robot arm, but they're basically using the same hardware. So the influence of software/algorithms in this case is pretty fundamental. There are a lot of papers on improved neural-decoding methods that at first glance appear really dry, boring, not the `sexy' kind of science with huge breakthroughs, but they end up being crucial to good performance as the complexity of the robot grows.

2) One participant was implanted with the electrode array 5 years before the study, and had the injury 10 years before that. Usually the signals don't last that long in monkey models. And we know that your cortex changes with disuse, so it's awesome that they were able to get usable signals so many years later.

What needs to get better are a couple things:

First, these decoders aren't perfect yet. What the Wired article didn't tell you is that the performance for the woman's implant was around 20-50% successful trials (still awesome from a comparison to no interaction)[1].

Second, incorporating sensory feedback is another challenge that is really hard to address, but also very important. Imagine building a robotic controller in which the only information you received about the robot's position was visual. That's the way this works. If we find a reasonable way to mimic sensors of muscle extension (a proxy for joint angle) then we can create more controllable devices.

[1] http://www.nature.com/news/mind-controlled-robot-arms-show-p...

> This is an area where hackers can really make an impact.

One of my friends has coauthored several papers with some of the BrainGate folks.

We spent a road trip a couple years ago discussing his research. One thing that jumped out is how similar many of the tools used in this field are to those in a startup. In particular, many big-data analysis tools and techniques that can be developed, optimized, and funded within the context of the web sphere are applied to the bioengineering problems. A few months ago an article floated around HN on how the current tech bubble, if it's such, lacks a "byproduct" that will benefit society when the scraps are cleaned up. You can make a pretty good argument that it's this.

That's got to be one of the most rewarding fields to be working in.