Incredible Brain-Machine Interface Research Leading To Robotic Prosthetics

 Brain Machine Interfaces

This past week, 60 Minutes featured an incredible piece on Jan Scheuermann, a research pioneer who has helped developers create a brain-machine interface that lets her move a robot arm with her brain alone.

In May last year Cathy Hutchinson became one of the first quadriplegic people in the world to move a robot with her mind alone. Working with a team led by John Donoghue, a neuroscientist at Brown University Hutchinson was able to operate a robotic hand directly with a brain-machine interface.

Now, last week on 60 Minutes, another pioneer in this field, Jan Scheuermann was featured operating a robot arm directly with her brain. Watching the clip [embedded below] of Scheuermann using the system for the first time is nothing short of an emotional experience.  

According to project researcher, Geoffrey Ling, "I'm old enough to have watched Neil Armstrong take that step on the moon. And, and to watch Jan do that, I had the same tingles. Because I realized that we have now stepped over a great threshold into what is possible. And very importantly, what patients can now expect in terms of restoration. This is a very important part. Not rehab, but restoration of function."

The robotic hand is the work of Michael McLoughlin and his team at the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland. McLoughlin led the multimillion dollar engineering of what has become the most sophisticated hand and arm ever developed. It's the same size and weight of an average man's arm and hand and everything is inside--including the computers and the batteries.  The arms have been outfitted on a telepresence robot, Robo Sally.

Funded by DARPA, Robo Sally will eventually be operated from great distances. It's feasible, says McLoughlin, that a technician located on a base in the U.S. could diffuse a bomb in, say, Afghanistan, by wearing the special Robo Sally virtual reality suit and visor.

Also, unlike the arms used by Jan Scheuermann, McLoughlin's robotic hands can be fitted with sensors to provide tactile feedback to a user — either to nerve endings as in the case of prosthetics users like 57-year-old Johnny Matheny who lost his arm to cancer and is also featured in the 60 Minutes piece.

Incredibly Matheny demonstrates correct discernment of the type of objects he is holding with the prosthetic hand every time.  The next steps for the researchers will be to add these sensory feedback connections directly to the brain connections for patients like Scheuermann.

As Ling describes, "I think it's taught me something really fundamental, and that is we are tool users. And our arms and legs are just tools for our brain. And so when we give another tool, in Jan's case, a robot arm, she will adapt to that tool to do the things that she wants to do."






SOURCE  CBS News

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