$6.7 Million for Bionic War on Disabilities
From: University of Utah News - 12/29/2004

The National Institutes of Health have awarded nearly $6.7 million in grants
to researchers at the University of Utah's College of Engineering and Health
Sciences Center to develop wireless electrodes that would help blind people
see and disabled people walk, speak, or control a computer with neural
impulses. Spearheading the project is bioengineering professor Richard
Normann, who created the Utah Electrode Array, a silicon chip equipped with
100 miniature electrodes that is placed under the dura. Cyberkinetics
Neurotechnology Systems included the device in its BrainGate System, which
allowed a paraplegic to control a computer screen cursor by thought last
year. Normann aims to expand the array's intelligence and make the device
wireless, and one of his goals is to implant the array in the brains of
visually impaired people, who would wear an eyeglass-mounted camera that
transmits images to the visual cortex via the array. The NIH grants are
allocated to four initiatives, with Normann a key participant in each. The
largest will go toward the development of the wireless array, which Normann
says "will have electronic circuitry integrated into it to amplify the
signals from each of the 100 electrodes, do signal processing on those
signals [to filter out noise and other unimportant information] and send
those signals wirelessly to a receiver located outside of the body." The
second-largest grant will be employed to implant the array on peripheral
nerves in a paraplegic's legs in order to stimulate motor function. A third
grant will be used to extend the array's biocompatibility so that the
patient's immune system does not inhibit its operation, while the fourth
grant will go toward studying the feasibility of reanimating vocal cords via
nerve stimulation by the device. 

http://www.utah.edu/unews/releases/04/dec/electrodes.html

