Woman controls robot arm with her mind

In this video, a woman known as Cathy, who is unable to speak or move any of her limbs or torso, controls a robot arm with her mind to take a sip of coffee. This fantastic breakthrough is reported in the current issue of the science journal Nature. Cathy has been implanted with a BrainGate neural interface (below left), the same technology that previously enabled two individuals to control computer cursors with thought alone. One of the lead researchers is Brown University neuroengineer Leigh Hochberg. I visited Leigh more than 13 years ago when he was a grad student at Emory University. He introduced me to monkeys who had received neuroimplants in his lab. At the time, Leigh was just trying to record the signals from the monkeys' brains while also dealing with the implants' proclivity to move around, reducing the quality of the signal over time. Leigh was humble, cautiously optimistic, and deeply dedicated. Amazing how far this research has come. From Nature:

The (latest) study participants — known as Cathy and Bob — had had strokes that damaged their brain stems and left them with tetraplegia and unable to speak. Neurosurgeons implanted tiny recording devices containing almost 100 hair-thin electrodes in the motor cortex of their brains, to record the neuronal signals associated with intention to move.

In a trial filmed in April last year and presented with the paper, Cathy, who had her stroke 15 years ago and received the implants in 2005, used her thoughts to steer a robot arm to grasp a bottle of coffee and lift it to her lips. She drank and smiled.

‘We’ll never forget that smile,” says Hochberg...

In the longer term, the scientists want to dispense with the wires that must be attached to a patient’s skull; wireless systems are in development… Even further in the future, researchers hope to dispense with the robot arms and direct the decoded brain signals straight to the patient’s own muscles.

"Mind-controlled robot arms show promise"

• [Michael Hogsett]

  Resistance is futile.

• [lknope]

  Don’t let Howard Wolowitz near that robot arm.

• [Nadreck]

  There was an old “Green Lantern” villain who had the same set-up: he controlled his army of robot duplicates from his iron lung.

• [cjporkchop]

  Truly a ‘wonderful thing!’ Robot Arm Chasers would be even better than Unicorn Chasers.

• [xzzy]

  The echo on the doctors when being interviewed makes them sound moderately evil, which leads me to believe this technology is only being developed to subjugate us all.

• [Katsumi]

  Did anyone else notice that the end of the video says 17 May 2012…yet it’s only the 16th?

  • [Jekka]

    17th is the actual date of the print issue of Nature

• [citizen]

  I, for one, welcome our new tetraplegic robot-controlling overlords.

• [Rich Keller]

  I can’t stop imagining her head poking out the top of a suit of Ultramarine armour with a powerglove attached to it.

• [Jack Daniel]

  I’d buy that for a dollar. 

• [Zak McKracken]

  In case anyone wonders what that funny logo on the robotic arm is:
  http://www.dlr.de/dlr/en/desktopdefault.aspx/tabid-10081/151_read-3443/

  That arm is part of th DLR (The German NASA if you will) Robot Justin for which there sadly is no english article on the DLR website (I’m sorry!). But this one has a nice video:
  http://www.dlr.de/next/desktopdefault.aspx/tabid-6670/10937_read-24893/

  The cool thing is that it takes and reacts to tactile feedback. There are plans to use it on space missions and whatnot. By now they’ve also developed a mobile module to which the torso can be mounted.

• [Tadas Jelinek]

  So.. What about Stephen Hawking? Could we give him something more advanced than cheek sensor already?

• [Teller]

  I’ve seen my wife control an entire human with hers.

• [ZikZak]

  If I ever had a kid, I’d train it on biofeedback stuff like this from birth.  Trying to learn how to control a new limb has got to be insanely hard as an adult, but what about for a young child?  Imagine a kid learning how to manipulate an external object – robotic limb , mouse cursor, etc – at the same time they learn to walk.  Would it become second nature to them?  Now we have “digital natives”, what would “cybernetic natives” be like?

• [Aaron Swain]

  So I guess we’re finally here!  Life just got a lot more cyberpunky all of a sudden.

• [lecti]

  It’ll be nice to get an extra pair of arms.

  • [Antinous / Moderator]

    Yo dawg.

• [Ben H Kram]

  Surprised that the novel “Interface” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interface_(novel) hasn’t been mentioned.

• [BombBlastLightingWaltz]

  Holy Magneto , errr, batman. 

• [HahTse]

  It’s amazing that they can control stuff to such a fine degree with an implant this localized. I mean…the implant doesn’t pick up on stuff that happen in other brain regions than those immediatley around it.
  I wonder if you could increase the level of control by implanting more chips in other areas of the brain.

  (But then they DID say that the implant has a proclivity for moving around, so it wouldn’t be a good idea to implant more, till they fix that XD )

  • [SamSam]

    We control individual muscles with even more localized neurons, but it doesn’t seem hard to us. The brain is incredibly plastic. Once it determines that activity among that handful of neurons starts to affect the robotic arm, it quite quickly starts entraining those neurons to respond to the motor desires.

    The same goes for the sensing side of things, btw. I don’t have the links, but I remember reading that blind patients who have had, say, pinprick pads attached to their tongues that map out what a helmet cam is seeing very quickly start to report that they feel like they’re actually “seeing.”