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,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.
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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.”
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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...
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.
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