For decades, technologists have been trying to get brains to interface with computer keyboards or robot arms, to get meat to commune with silicon.
On [October 28], a team of scientists and engineers showed results from a promising new approach. It involvesย mounting electrodesย on an expandable, springy tube called a stent and threading it through a blood vessel that leads to the brain. In tests on two people, the researchers literally went for the jugular, running a stent-tipped wire up that vein in the throat and then into a vessel near the brainโs primary motor cortex, where they popped the spring.
The electrodes snuggled into the vessel wall and started sensing when the peopleโs brains signaled their intention to moveโand sent those signals wirelessly to a computer, via an infrared transmitter surgically inserted in the subjectsโ chests. In anย articleย published in theย Journal of NeuroInterventional Surgery, the Australian and US researchers describe how two people with paralysis due to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (better known as Lou Gehrigโs disease) used such a device to send texts and fool around online by brain-control alone.
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โSelf-expanding stent technology has been well demonstrated in both cardiac and neurological applications to treat other disease. We just use that feature and put electrodes on top of the stent,โ says [interventional neurologist] Thomas Oxley.
