Progress on brain-machine interface offers hope for long-term amputees

amputees control robot arm with their brains

The research advances hope for future robotic prosthetics from which amputees would receive sensory feedback on the limb’s position and what it is touching, according to the neuroscientists and biologists who carried out the study. They found that the brains of the subject generated news connections to control the robotic limb, even if the electrodes that facilitated that control were not implanted until several years after the limb was amputated.

Published in Nature Communications, the research involved implanting an array of electrodes into Rhesus monkeys who had previously had arms amputated (in response to injuries at an early age, they stress; not for this research). In two animals, the electrodes were placed in the motor cortex on the opposite side of the brain to the missing limb, but in a third, they were placed on the same side.

The monkeys were then trained (bribed by helpings of fruit juice) to control a robotic arm to grasp a ball, using only their minds. During this activity, the researchers monitored the activity of brain cells around the implants, and used statistical techniques to calculate how the cells were connected to each other.