Swiss quadriplegic tests implants that ‘read’ thoughts – 09/27/2023 – Science

A 46-year-old Swiss man has become the first quadriplegic person to test a new technology that, through the combination of two implants, one in the brain and the other in the spinal cord, allows him to move his arms, hands and fingers using thought again.

The combination of implants — which “read” thoughts using artificial intelligence and then transmit the signals through the patient’s own nervous system — had already been tested on a paraplegic individual, who was able to walk again, an advance that was published in the journal scientific Nature in May.

Now, this is the first time the same technique has been used to restore movement to the upper extremities.

“Arm mobility is more complex,” surgeon Jocelyne Bloch, who carried out the interventions to place the implants, explained to AFP.

With the arms, there is no problem with balance, but “the muscles of the hand are quite thin, with many different small muscles that are activated at the same time for certain movements”, he explains.

The patient, who asked to remain anonymous, lost movement after a fall. Last month, he underwent two operations at the Vaudois University Hospital Center in Lausanne, Switzerland.

The first procedure was to place, in place of a small piece of skull bone, a brain implant measuring a few centimeters in diameter, designed by the French organization CEA-Clinatech.

In the second, electrodes developed by the Dutch company Onward were placed at the level of the cervical cord, connected to a small stimulator approximately the size of a credit card implanted in the abdomen.

The brain implant records the regions of the brain that are activated when the patient thinks about a movement and communicates them to the electrodes, like a kind of “digital bridge”.

“For now, everything is going well,” described Bloch, co-founder of Onward and consultant to the company.

“We can record brain activity and we know that the stimulus works […] But it is still too early to talk about the progress made, what it is capable of doing now”, he commented.

Training

The patient is in the training phase to try to make the brain implant recognize the different movements that he can no longer perform.

You will need to repeat these movements many times before they become natural. The process will take months, according to Bloch.

Two other patients are expected to participate in this study, the results of which will be published later.

Spinal cord stimulation has been used in the past so that patients with paralysis could move their arms, but without reading their thoughts with a brain implant attached.

In turn, brain implants were used so that a patient could move their extremities using a mentally controlled exoskeleton. Furthermore, the Battelle organization used a brain implant so that a patient could move his arm, but using electrodes placed on the forearm.

Onward is unique in its desire to restore movement through stimulation of the spinal cord along with a brain implant, company director Dave Marver explained to AFP.

According to him, the technology could become commercially viable “by the end of the decade.”

The field of brain implants is booming, with companies like Elon Musk’s Synchron and Neuralink. Its goal is to allow patients with some type of paralysis to control computers using their thoughts to perform actions such as writing, among other things.