$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