First Successful Brain Implant Makes A Paralyzed Man Feel Touch

Oh how good it feels to touch something once more

Scientists have finally been able to help a paralyzed man feel and experience the sense of touch in his mind through a min controlled robotic arm. This state-of-the-art experiment is collaboration between the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and the University of Pittsburg itself.

Image: futuretimeline

Electrodes that are even smaller than a sand grain are implanted in the man’s brain particularly in his sensory cortex. It is these electrodes that receive signals from the robotic arm like when the fingers of the prosthesis were pressed. The man then felt the pressure in the fingers of his paralyzed right hand. This was because the damaged spinal cord was bypassed.

The results have been repeated over many months with the 30-year-old guy named Nathan Copeland. This is definitely a breakthrough in the restoration of such critical functions for people with paralyzed limbs. They could not only move these limbs but also feel them now. This result was featured as President Obama visited Pittsburgh on Thursday for the White House Frontiers Conference for advances in science, medicine, and technology.

 Hence, neuroscience has been able to invent a technology where just imagining a motion can result in translation of motion of the robotic arm.

Obama was proud of the ‘cool’ moment when he asked Copeland to give him a handshake.

Copeland had lost his motion when his car went out of control while a teenager some ten years back. He was then diagnosed with Tetraplegia which means paralysis of all four limbs though he could move a bit of his shoulders.

He volunteered at the UPMC research where the team of surgeons, doctors of rehabilitative medicine, and biomedical engineers had been practicing with technology to make a reality for what they had wanted to achieve. Copeland nanotechnology proved to be the perfect candidate and this, the achievement was made, a milestone indeed.

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