New technology allowed paralyzed man to control his own hand

Biotechnologies are rapidly developing, and quite often there are news on the topic of restoring the functionality of paralyzed limbs using various kinds of technologies. Unfortunately, there is no ideal yet, all these technologies are projects that are far from completion.

However, there is a hope that in the near future there will be a method of full restoration of the functionality of the arm / leg of other parts of the body of a paralyzed person. For example, recently the technology of the company Battelle was demonstrated, which allowed the partially paralyzed Ian Burkhart to start moving his “lost” hand.
')
The fact is that four years ago, Yang broke his neck as a result of an unsuccessful diving into the water, and as a result almost all of his body was paralyzed, including his right arm (from fingertips to elbows). Yang came to the attention of the staff of the non-profit organization Battelle, which develops methods for treating people with problems like Yang.

Now the Battelle method consists of implanting a special chip (the chip size is smaller than a pea) and a transmitter into the patient's brain. In addition, electrodes are attached to the hand, plus a cable attached to a PC with a special software is attached to a chip mounted on the patient's head, which sends signals from the brain to the nerves of the hand.



In order to control the hand, the patient needs some time to train in order to learn how to give the “right” signals coming to the PC directly from the brain. All this looks very cumbersome, but now it is all - a prototype, which with the help of modern technology can be easily made portable.

Hand control, as we see, goes around the inactive part of the human nervous system. Between the desire to perform something or another action and the execution of this action takes less than 1/10 of a second, the whole system works fairly quickly.



After several trainings, Yang was able to move his fingers, clench his hand into a fist, and even take a spoon lying on the table in his hand (this was already a spontaneous attempt, there were no preliminary training sessions on taking things in his hands). Before that, the patient had to recover the atrophied muscles of the paralyzed arm for several months, developing the muscles with the help of special exercises.

In the future, experts hope to restore functionality to only individual limbs, but also the entire body of the patient.

Testing video:



A little about technology:



Via medcitynews