Controlling a Robotic Arm with a Patient's Intentions
From: Medical Design Technology - 05/21/2015

In a clinical trial, the Caltech team and colleagues from Keck Medicine of
USC have successfully implanted neuroprosthetics in a part of the brain that
controls not the movement directly but rather our intent to move, in a
patient with quadriplegia, giving him the ability to perform a fluid
hand-shaking gesture and even play "rock, paper, scissors" using a separate
robotic arm.

In the clinical trial, designed to test the safety and effectiveness of this
new approach, the Caltech team collaborated with surgeons at Keck Medicine of
USC and the rehabilitation team at Rancho Los Amigos National Rehabilitation
Center. The surgeons implanted a pair of small electrode arrays in two parts
of the PPC of a quadriplegic patient. Each array contains 96 active
electrodes that, in turn, each record the activity of a single neuron in the
PPC. The arrays were connected by a cable to a system of computers that
processed the signals, decoded the intent of the subject, and controlled
output devices that included a computer cursor and a robotic arm developed by
collaborators at Johns Hopkins University.

Read the entire article at:
http://www.mdtmag.com/news/2015/05/controlling-robotic-arm-patients-intentions

Link:
Neuroprosthetic Device Enables Intuitive Control of Robotic Arm
http://www.medicaldesignbriefs.com/component/content/article/1104-mdb/news/22268