/ News
Brain implant provides sense of touch with robotic hand – and that’s just the start
A dozen years ago, an auto accident left Nathan Copeland paralyzed, without any feeling in his fingers. Now that feeling is back, thanks to a robotic hand wired up to a brain implant.
“I can feel just about every finger – it’s a really weird sensation,” the 28-year-old Pennsylvanian told doctors a month after his surgery.
Today the brain-computer interface is taking a share of the spotlight at the White House Frontiers Conference in Pittsburgh, with President Barack Obama and other luminaries in attendance.
The ability to wire sensors into the part of the brain that registers the human sense of touch is just one of many medical marvels being developed on the high-tech frontiers of rehabilitation.
“You learn completely new and different things every time you come at this from different directions,” Arati Prabhakar, director of the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, said last week at the GeekWire Summit in Seattle.
Prabhakar provided a preview of the Copeland’s progress during her talk. DARPA’s Revolutionizing Prosthetics program provided the primary funding for the project, which was conducted at the University of Pittsburgh and its medical center, UPMC.
The full details of the experiment were published online today in Science Translational Medicine.
Copeland’s spinal cord was severely injured in an accident in the winter of 2004, when he was an 18-year-old college freshman. The injury left him paralyzed from the upper chest down, with no ability to feel or move his lower arms or legs.
Right after the accident, Copeland put himself on Pitt’s registry of patients willing to participate in clinical trials. Nearly a decade later, a medical team led by Pitt researcher Robert Gaunt chose him to participate in a groundbreaking series of operations.
Gaunt and his colleagues had been working for years on developing brain implants that let disabled patients control prosthetic limbs with their thoughts. “Slowly but surely, we have been moving this research forward,” study co-author Michael Boninger, a professor at Pitt as well as the director of post-acute care for UPMC’s Health Services Division, said in a news release.
This experiment moved the team’s efforts in a new direction. Four arrays of microelectrodes were implanted into the region of Copeland’s brain that would typically take in sensory signals from his fingers. Over the course of several months, researchers stimulated specific points in the somatosensory cortex, and mapped which points made Copeland feel as if a phantom finger was being touched.
“Sometimes it feels electrical, and sometimes it’s pressure,” Copeland said, “but for the most part, I can tell most of the fingers with definite precision. It feels like my fingers are getting touched or pushed.’
To test the results, the researchers placed sensors onto each of the fingers of a robotic hand. They connected the system to Copeland’s brain electrodes, and put a blindfold over his eyes. Then an experimenter touched the robo-hand’s fingers and asked Copeland if he could tell where the feeling was coming from.
Over the course of 13 sessions, each involving hundreds of finger touches, Copeland’s success rate was 84 percent. The index and little fingers were easy to identify, while the middle and ring fingers were harder.
During the experiment, Copeland learned to distinguish the intensity of the touch to some extent – but for what it’s worth, he couldn’t distinguish between hot and cold. That’ll have to come later.
“The ultimate goal is to create a system which moves and feels just like a natural arm would,” Gaunt said. “We have a long way to go to get there, but this is a great start.”
Prabhakar said neurotechnology is a high priority for DARPA, in part because of the kinds of injuries that warfighters have suffered in conflicts abroad.
“Lower-limb prosthetics have gotten very good – but upper-limb prosthetics, until very recently, have still been limited to a very simple hook,” she said.
Source: https://www.yahoo.com/tech/brain-implant-provides-sense-touch-160028412.html
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Founded by Russian entrepreneur Dmitry Itskov in February 2011 with the participation of leading Russian specialists in the field of neural interfaces, robotics, artificial organs and systems.
The main goals of the 2045 Initiative: the creation and realization of a new strategy for the development of humanity which meets global civilization challenges; the creation of optimale conditions promoting the spiritual enlightenment of humanity; and the realization of a new futuristic reality based on 5 principles: high spirituality, high culture, high ethics, high science and high technologies.
The main science mega-project of the 2045 Initiative aims to create technologies enabling the transfer of a individual’s personality to a more advanced non-biological carrier, and extending life, including to the point of immortality. We devote particular attention to enabling the fullest possible dialogue between the world’s major spiritual traditions, science and society.
A large-scale transformation of humanity, comparable to some of the major spiritual and sci-tech revolutions in history, will require a new strategy. We believe this to be necessary to overcome existing crises, which threaten our planetary habitat and the continued existence of humanity as a species. With the 2045 Initiative, we hope to realize a new strategy for humanity's development, and in so doing, create a more productive, fulfilling, and satisfying future.
The "2045" team is working towards creating an international research center where leading scientists will be engaged in research and development in the fields of anthropomorphic robotics, living systems modeling and brain and consciousness modeling with the goal of transferring one’s individual consciousness to an artificial carrier and achieving cybernetic immortality.
An annual congress "The Global Future 2045" is organized by the Initiative to give platform for discussing mankind's evolutionary strategy based on technologies of cybernetic immortality as well as the possible impact of such technologies on global society, politics and economies of the future.
Future prospects of "2045" Initiative for society
2015-2020
The emergence and widespread use of affordable android "avatars" controlled by a "brain-computer" interface. Coupled with related technologies “avatars’ will give people a number of new features: ability to work in dangerous environments, perform rescue operations, travel in extreme situations etc.
Avatar components will be used in medicine for the rehabilitation of fully or partially disabled patients giving them prosthetic limbs or recover lost senses.
2020-2025
Creation of an autonomous life-support system for the human brain linked to a robot, ‘avatar’, will save people whose body is completely worn out or irreversibly damaged. Any patient with an intact brain will be able to return to a fully functioning bodily life. Such technologies will greatly enlarge the possibility of hybrid bio-electronic devices, thus creating a new IT revolution and will make all kinds of superimpositions of electronic and biological systems possible.
2030-2035
Creation of a computer model of the brain and human consciousness with the subsequent development of means to transfer individual consciousness onto an artificial carrier. This development will profoundly change the world, it will not only give everyone the possibility of cybernetic immortality but will also create a friendly artificial intelligence, expand human capabilities and provide opportunities for ordinary people to restore or modify their own brain multiple times. The final result at this stage can be a real revolution in the understanding of human nature that will completely change the human and technical prospects for humanity.
2045
This is the time when substance-independent minds will receive new bodies with capacities far exceeding those of ordinary humans. A new era for humanity will arrive! Changes will occur in all spheres of human activity – energy generation, transportation, politics, medicine, psychology, sciences, and so on.
Today it is hard to imagine a future when bodies consisting of nanorobots will become affordable and capable of taking any form. It is also hard to imagine body holograms featuring controlled matter. One thing is clear however: humanity, for the first time in its history, will make a fully managed evolutionary transition and eventually become a new species. Moreover, prerequisites for a large-scale expansion into outer space will be created as well.
Key elements of the project in the future
• International social movement
• social network immortal.me
• charitable foundation "Global Future 2045" (Foundation 2045)
• scientific research centre "Immortality"
• business incubator
• University of "Immortality"
• annual award for contribution to the realization of the project of "Immortality”.
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