A New Way to Plug a Human Brain Into a Computer: Via Veins
takyon writes:
Two Australian men with neuromuscular disorders regained some personal independence after researchers implanted stent-like electrodes in their brains, allowing them to operate computers using their thoughts.
[...] The feat was described today in the Journal of Neurointerventional Surgery. "This paper represents the first fully implantable, commercial BCI system that patients can take home and use," says Tom Oxley, founder of Melbourne-based Synchron, which developed the device.
[...] The stentrode offers a less intrusive way to get electrodes to the brain. The device is squeezed into a catheter and placed in the jugular vein in the neck. From there the catheter snakes up through blood vessels until it reaches the motor cortex of the brain. Then it releases the stentrode, which holds 16 electrode contacts and springs out into a tube-like scaffold that fits against the walls of a blood vessel in that section of the brain.
The stentrode is connected by a lead down to a device that is surgically implanted in the chest. The device provides power and data transmission. An external device interprets the signals from the brain using machine learning algorithms and converts them to computer commands.
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