New Brain-Computer Interface Reads
Movement Signals

On July 13, in the journal Nature, a team of researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, Brown University in Providence, R.I., and Cybernetics Neurotechnology Systems Inc. in Foxborough, Mass., announced a major victory for their BrainGate technology: A 25-year-old man with a high spinal cord injury, almost completely paralyzed since 2001, was able to open e-mail, operate a television, and use a robotic arm and hand.

The device, known as a “brain-computer interface,” or BCI, guides movement by picking up nerve cell activity patterns in the motor cortex, the part of the brain where movement signals originate. It’s being tested in pilot trials in people with spinal cord injuries, ALS and other conditions.

Unlike other systems, the BrainGate uses electrodes that are implanted in the motor cortex, rather than attached to the heads’s surface.

When a computer mouse receives signals from the cortex, it interprets them as if the person were moving the mouse with his hand. “The signal available in the cortex is a good representation of what you want to do with your hand,” says John Donoghue, a professor in the Department of Neuroscience at Brown University and the founder and chief scientific officer of Cyberkinetics Neurotechnology Systems. “If you were moving a mouse, and I could sample a couple of dozen cells from your motor cortex, I could tell what you were doing. The sensor reads out that neural activity.”

Donoghue says that the motor cortex is likely to be at least partially preserved, even in people with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). He says BrainGate “isn’t a Lamborghini yet. It’s clunky, but it will get better over time. That’s how science progresses.”

Prospective participants in two trials of BrainGate (one that includes ALS patients and another that includes muscular dystrophy patients) at Massachusetts General Hospital must live within a two-hour drive of Boston. For more information, see www.cyberkineticsinc.com.