Eventually, this set-up allowed the subject to walk across a room, stopping at designed points along a course, by controlling the entire system using only his waves, Dr. Nenadic explained in an email to redOrbit.
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Adam Fritz hasn’t walked in five years, since a motorcycle crash left him paralyzed from the waist down. The training aimed to help the man generate recognizable walking signals for the brain to pick up, as well as teach him to learn how to maximize the use of the device by practicing to put one foot in front of the other. “This non-invasive system for leg muscle stimulation is a promising method and is an advance on our current brain-controlled systems, which use virtual reality or a robotic exoskeleton”. In the final stage, he was only partially supported to prevent falls as he walked just over three-and-a-half metres.
This proof-of-concept study involved a single patient so further studies are needed to establish whether these results are true for a larger population of individuals with paraplegia, researchers said.
This is for the first time ever when a person, who couldn’t walk because of a spinal cord injury (SCI), has firmly operated a non-invasive brain computer interface (BCI) system for over-ground walking in real time.
The scientists responsible for this achievement are now looking to create a system that sends brain waves from the legs to the brain. “We showed that you can restore intuitive, brain-controlled walking after a complete spinal cord injury”, said Do.
The signals were then picked up by an electroencephalogram (EEG) he wore as a cap and were transmitted to a computer for processing by a special algorithm that could isolate the messages related only to leg motion and convert them to signals that would stimulate the patient’s muscles to walk. After five years without the ability to walk, a 26-year-old paraplegic was able to perform a few steps thanks to a recent invention.
Researchers believe that this is a vital first step in demonstrating that direct brain control can reverse the effects of complete paralysis and restore function into a person’s limbs.
The National Science Foundation and the Spinal Cord Injury Fund funded this research.
“This limitation can potentially be addressed by a fully implantable brain-computer interface system, which can be envisioned to employ invasively recorded neural signals”.
He also underwent extensive physiotherapy to wake up and strengthen his long-dormant leg muscles.
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The electrodes that capture the encephalogram activity of the brain in the scalp cap did not penetrate the skin, but they could in future be developed as a more permanent implant if the technology can be improved and shown to work for other patients, Dr Nenadic said.
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