Brain implant restores man's sense of touch and arm movement | Hacker News Reader

Brain implant restores man's sense of touch and arm movement

wired.com

57 pointsn0pe_p0pe15 comments

Open articleView on HN

This makes me wonder:

1 - Since this device can control this person's own movements, could the movements of somebody else be controlled?

2 - Can the sense of touch this person feel be transmitted to someone else?

3 - Could the sense of touch be "filtered" (like applying a Photoshop filter)?

4 - Could these sensations be recorded and replayed?

At least in principle, all of these should be possible. It seems we're rapidly moving towards a world where we can control each other's bodies and radically change or even induce perceptions.

Theoretically the answer to all your questions is yes. Simply said (but not false AFAIK, I work in the field): stimulate the correct group of brain cells and you can achieve pretty much anything you want; after all everything you do/feel/think is done by having groups of cells activated and communicating with each other somehow. The main problem is finding those groups of cells.. There is an incredible amount of research left to do on how to do it because what we know about the brain is still much less than what we do not know, and the implementation (hardware etc) is also complicated on all levels you van imagine.

Yeah, but what if your sense of touch is different than another's? Like say you are blind and the way you process touch is completely different.

Not to mention sense of touch isn't standardized by a regulation's body.

You'd enjoy Homo Deus by Yuval Noah Harari

Warning: was diving into waves. A terrible, terrible idea. The hospital in San Francisco sees about one a month - young person with their whole life ahead of them, a quadriplegic because they decided to dive into a wave at the beach.

Although the system still feels far from perfect: requiring a VHS-sized control box, a lack of full simulation of natural touch and movement; it's definitely an amazing achievement. I wonder how feasible production of these would be in the future and how costly they would be. It seems like specialized tech that could run a patient thousands of dollars.

I'm guessing that the connector and control box are pretty much hand wired with some printed boards. The hardware cost should be more like $50 if factory made. It's great to see a prototype like this working but we're technologically capable of so much more.

That depends on how much signal processing and interfacing needs to be done. If it needs some serious heavy lifting then $50 might not even cover the FPGA.

Why use an FPGA in mass production when an IC would be faster and cheaper?

How many of these would you sell? I would imagine an ASIC manufacturer isn't going to pick up the phone for less than 10k units.

You can actually buy an FPGA today, too. The added time spent getting expensive engineers and doctors to integrate and test the ASIC probably wouldn't be worth it in low volumes.

On top of that if you have complicated signal aquisition circuitry the ADCs alone might be another $100.

If you could perfect a system that restores motion and/or feeling to paralyzed parts of the human body you could sell millions of units[0]

[0] https://www.christopherreeve.org/living-with-paralysis/stats...

It's not the size of a VHS machine, but only the size of a VHS tape, which is relatively small... about the size of a couple of large smartphones stacked on each other, or a paperback book.

Yeah, but a VHS tape is still not something people with disabilities can carry around conveniently, unless they fashion some straps for it. It'd still be nice to see how it gets progressively smaller as the tech is refined.

This kind of work is so interesting, I believe U Pitt does a lot of leading research here.

change title acronym to Brain-Computer Interface, or Brain Implant or something

Reply on news.ycombinator.com