When the T5 patient suffered a spinal cord injury that left him paralyzed, his dream of flying with a drone seemed to be out of reach forever.
Now, thanks to the brain implant, he has experienced the excitement of the simulation. By introducing his fingers in his mind, a 69 -year -old cool flow of a virtual drone in the video game, with a quadcopter avoiding obstacles and randomly found rings in real time.
The T5 is part of the Braingate2 clinical study of the neural interface that was launched in 2009, which helps to control the paralyzed people with computer cursors, robotic weapons and other devices by decoding electrical activity in their brains. It’s not just for playing games. Having the ability to move and click on the cursor is back online. Googling, e-mails, streaming programs, shifting, although contributions to social media-that people spend their lives every day now again part of their lives.
But the course can do so much. Popular game consoles – PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo Switch – require you to move your fingers, especially thumbs, fast and in more directions.
Contemporary brain implants often take a bird’s view of the whole hand. A new study published in Medical natureHe divided his fingers into three groups – thumbs, pointer and middle finger and finger and pinks. After training, the T5 could move each group of fingers independently using the subsequent softness. Its brain implant also lifted intentions to stretch, choose or move the thumb to the side and let it pilot the drone as if using the video game driver.
He called his gaming session “sticking time”, T5 enthusiastically said that piloting the drone allowed him to mentally “lift” from his bed or meat for the first injury of TEME SINCERI. Like other players, he asked the research team to record his best runs and share videos with friends.
Mind-Mind-Mind-Mind-Mind-Mind-Melds are “spreading from functional to recreational applications,” wrote Nick Ramsey and Maristesel in the University Medical Center Utrecht, who did not look at the study.
Control of the mind
In the last two decades, the connection of the brains and the machines has become sci-fi to reality and for people who paralyzed the spinal cord injury.
These injuries, whether for an accident or degeneration, strong nerve highways between the brain and muscles. Scientists have long tried to restore these connections. Some worked on the regeneration of broken nerve endings inside the body with mixed results. Others build over the gap of artificial “bridges”. These implants, often placed in the spinal cord above the injury point, record signals from the brain, the intention of movement and stimulate muscles for download or relaxation. Thanks to these systems, paralyzes were able to walk again – offten with the help – for long distances and minimal training.
Other efforts made without muscles completely, instead knocking directly into brain electrical signals connected to the digital universe. Previous studies have found that monitoring or representing movements – such as, say, ask the patient to imagine the cursor movement around the browser – Geeras similar to brain patterns to physically perform movements. Recording these “signature signatures” from individual people can decode their intention to move.
Noland Arbaugh, the first person to receive the brain from Elon Muska Neuralink, is perhaps the best known success. At the end of last year the young man lived his life for three days, shared his view when moving the cursor and playing a video game in bed.
However, decoding individual finger movements is a greater challenge. Our hands are particularly skillful and flexible, making writing, musical instruments, grabbing a cup of coffee or lighting our thumbs. Each finger is controlled by complex networks of brain activities that work under the hood to generate complex movements.
Fingers with wavy, twisting and stretching apart. The decryption of brain patterns that allow them individually and collective cooperation has stylized researchers. “In humans, finger decoding has only been demonstrated in offline analyzes or classification from the recorded nervous activity,” the authors wrote. The brain signal control was not used to control the fingers in real time. Even in monkeys, brain implants were able to separate their fingers into two groups that move independently, and reduce the overall flexibility of their paws.
Virtual flex
In 2016, the T5 had two small implants inserted into the “button” of his brain – one for each side that controls the movements of hands and fingers. Each implant, the size of the child aspirin, had 96 microelectrode channels that quietly captured its brain activity when it was through a number of training tasks. At the time of surgery, the T5 could randomly twitch their hands and legs.
The team first designed a hand avatar. He did not fully catch the dexterity of the human hand. The index and middle finger moved together as a group, as well as a ring and pinkie. Meanwhile, the thumbs could stretch, curl and move sideways to the side.
For training, T5 watched the movement of Avatar hands and imagined his fingers to move synchronization. Using an artificial neural network, which specializes in decoding signals over time, the team further created AI to decipher the brain activity of T5 and correlate every formula with different types of finger movements. The “decoder” was these uses to convert his intentions into newspaper movements of the handyer avatar on the computer screen.
In the initial test that only allowed the thumb expansion and ripple – what scientists call “2D” – the participant was able to expand his fingers groups to a virtual target with more than 98 accuracy of the pier. Every attempt lasted only a little more than a second.
Adding the movement of the thumb on the side had a similar success, but doubling time (although it became faster when he became acquainted with the task). Overall, the T5 could control its virtual hand to achieve approximately 76 targets in a minute, much faster than the previous number. The training “was not tiring,” he said.
The movement of each group of fingers was then mapped to a virtual drone. Like moving joysticks and pressing the buttons on the video game controller, the fingers moved the quadcopter at will. The system kept a virtual hand in a relaxed, neutral pose if the T5 did not decide to move any of the groups of fingers.
On the day of testing, he flew a drone a dozen times on several obstacle courses. Each course required to use one of the movements of a group of fingers to successfully navigate randomly appearing rings and other obstacles. For example, one challenge to let him fly by eight years over a few rings without hitting them. The system was about six times better than previous systems.
Although his virtual fingers and their movements were displayed on the computer screen while playing, the visual elements were not necessary.
“When the drone moves and the fingers move, it is easier and faster to look at the drone,” he said. Piloting it was intuitive, “like cycling on the way to work, (thinking)” What will I do at work today “and still moving the gear on the bike and moving to the right.”
It was also adapting to a simple training exercise to more complicated movements. “It’s like you are a clarinet player and pick up someone else’s clarinet.” You know differently and there is a small curve of learning, but it is based on you (have) an implicit connection with your clarinet, ”he said. If you want to control the drone, you have to “tickle the direction”, he added.
The system is still by far commercial use and will have to be tested for more people. New brain -implant hardware with multiple channels could further increase performance. But this is the first step that opens online games for multiple players – and potential, better control over other programs and sophisticated robotic hands – people with paralysis, enrich their social life and overall well -being.