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terça-feira, 7 de maio de 2013

Miguel Nicolelis (.br) - Mind-controlled prostheses offer hope for disabled

By Devin Powell, Published: May 6







The first kick of the 2014 FIFA World Cup may be delivered in Sao Paulo next June by a Brazilian who is paralyzed from the waist down. If all goes according to plan, the teenager will walk onto the field, cock back a foot and swing at the soccer ball, using a mechanical exoskeleton controlled by the teen’s brain.
Motorized metal braces tested on monkeys will support and bend the kicker’s legs. The braces will be stabilized by gyroscopes and powered by a battery carried by the kicker in a backpack. German-made sensors will relay a feeling of pressure when each foot touches the ground. And months of training on a virtual-reality simulator will have prepared the teenager — selected from a pool of 10 candidates — to do all this using a device that translates thoughts into actions.
( WALK AGAIN PROJECT ) - Scientists hope to have a disabled teenager kick off the 2014 World Cup in Brazil using a mechanical exoskeleton controlled by the teen’s brain.

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“We want to galvanize people’s imaginations,” says Miguel Nicolelis, the Brazilian neuroscientist at Duke University who is leading the Walk Again Project’s efforts to create the robotic suit. “With enough political will and investment, we could make wheelchairs obsolete.”
Mind-controlled leg armor may sound more like the movie “Iron Man” than modern medicine. But after decades of testing on rats and monkeys, neuroprosthetics are finally beginning to show promise for people. Devices plugged directly into the brain seem capable of restoring some self-reliance to stroke victims, car crash survivors, injured soldiers and others hampered by incapacitated or missing limbs.
A sip of water
Nicolelis is a pioneer in the field. In the 1990s, he helped build the first mind-controlled arm. Rats learned that they could manipulate the device to get a drink of water simply by thinking about doing so.
In that project, an electronic chip was embedded in the part of each rodent’s brain that controls voluntary muscle movements. Rows of wires that stuck out from the chip like bristles on a brush picked up electrical impulses generated by brain cells and relayed those signals to a computer.
Researchers studied the signals as the rats pushed a lever to guide the arm that gave them water, and they saw groups of neurons firing at different rates as the rats moved the lever in different directions. An algorithm was developed to decipher the patterns, discern the animal’s intention at any given moment and send commands from the brain directly to the arm instead of to the lever. Eventually, rats could move the arm without pushing the lever at all.
Using similar brain-machine interfaces, Nicolelis and his colleagues learned to translate the neural signals in primate brains. In 2000, they reported that an owl monkey connected to the Internet had controlled an arm located 600 miles away. Eight years later, the team described a rhesus monkey that was able to dictate the pace of a robot jogging on a treadmill half a world away in Japan.
Small groups of neurons, it seemed, were surprisingly capable of communicating with digital devices. Individual cells learn to communicate with computer algorithms more effectively over time by changing their firing patterns, as revealed in a study of a mouse’s brain published last year in Nature. “You can count on this plasticity when designing a prosthetic,” says Jose Carmena, a neuroscientist at the University of California at Berkeley. “You can count on the brain to learn.”
 
PineWalrus
4:34 PM GMT-0300
This may be the most important article in WaPo. Just as the Wright Brothers were able to maintain controlled flight for just a brief time in 1903, the disabled will regain the ability to walk, move and be independent through this technology....if our priorities can be placed in peaceful technologies. As controlled flight progressed from a brief, almost uncontrolled result in 1903, just think what mind-controlled technologies will be like in ten years. The blind will see, the lame will walk...
BamBamRubble
4:45 PM GMT-0300
I hope you are right. But I worry that the anti-science, anti-government, and, frankly republican-aligned elements in our society will undermine and delay these types of exciting breakthrough technologies.
markap61
4:55 PM GMT-0300
Fantastic and exciting - hope some of our best young minds are working on this instead of manipulating Wall Street. I was going to say "creating the next video game" but that might actually have a good tie in.
 
 
fonte:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/mind-controlled-prostheses-offer-hope-for-disabled/2013/05/03/fbc1018a-8778-11e2-98a3-b3db6b9ac586_story.html

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