Paralyzed Woman Controls Robotic Arm With Her Mind

What makes this awesome from a scientific point of view:

1) 2-dimensional decoders, where an individual controls a mouse with their mind, have existed for a while. What makes this really cool is that there are actually quite a few degrees of freedom in a robot arm, but they're basically using the same hardware. So the influence of software/algorithms in this case is pretty fundamental. There are a lot of papers on improved neural-decoding methods that at first glance appear really dry, boring, not the `sexy' kind of science with huge breakthroughs, but they end up being crucial to good performance as the complexity of the robot grows.

2) One participant was implanted with the electrode array 5 years before the study, and had the injury 10 years before that. Usually the signals don't last that long in monkey models. And we know that your cortex changes with disuse, so it's awesome that they were able to get usable signals so many years later.

What needs to get better are a couple things:

First, these decoders aren't perfect yet. What the Wired article didn't tell you is that the performance for the woman's implant was around 20-50% successful trials (still awesome from a comparison to no interaction)[1].

Second, incorporating sensory feedback is another challenge that is really hard to address, but also very important. Imagine building a robotic controller in which the only information you received about the robot's position was visual. That's the way this works. If we find a reasonable way to mimic sensors of muscle extension (a proxy for joint angle) then we can create more controllable devices.

[1] http://www.nature.com/news/mind-controlled-robot-arms-show-p...

The smile on that lady's face says more than any number of facebook 'likes' or google +1's could ever do for me, that's a real and measurable quality of life improvement for a single person, this really makes a difference.

The engineering on that arm is pretty heavy duty, I wonder what it weighs and how fast it could move and what kind of safeguards are built in to avoid the operator injuring themselves due to glitches in the system. If you look at the way the arm moves it is actually quite comparable to the arm of a baby that moves an object to its mouth the first couple of times.

With one big difference, a baby may get it wrong but it is not strong enough to do too much damage, even if it pokes itself in the eye every now and then it is usually with very little force. This arm however looks engineered to be strong enough and fast enough that it could do real damage to the operator or its environment. If that's servo driven there has to be a whole slew of safety systems in case a driver decides to hook a motor to V+ or V- because of a blown FET.

In any real-world machinery situation where the machinery is under software control and has the capability of doing real harm (for instance: machine shops with CNC gear) there are normally countless interlock systems that you'd have to bypass before you could get yourself in contact with a piece of it moving under control of the computer. In this case the operator is extremely exposed and I cringed when the arm sped up towards her face with the bottle. I also found myself sort of 'willing the bottle' in the right direction, they way some movies will have you react to something on the screen. Hard to describe.

This is not a soft hand moving either, it looks like it is made of pretty strong aluminum and fairly heavy.

We tend to forget how necessary movement and control is for our daily routines. There are people out there who even lack the ability to turn on|off the TV. A little hacking with an arduino, and some buttons will make it possible for them.

In hackaday.com, one consistently sees hacks that are for the disabled. Special game controllers for people missing an arm, or some other limb are popular and simple to re-create.

I do have a personal anecdote.

I was once buying some resistors on the local radio shack. While I looked in the mess of tiny plastic bags, another person started to browse for electronic bits. I started to talk to him, and found out he was a doctor. His work was in dealing with disabled people. He had learned how to work with embedded electronics and fiber composites in order to build prosthetic limbs for impoverished patients.

Just amazing.

1) stability of the electrode array over long timescales.

2) increasing the number of degrees of freedom of robust control that we can decode from the neural data. Activity in the motor cortex inherently lives in a (very) roughly 10 dimensional space, which is a bit of a mystery since we use thy activity to control hundreds of muscles independently. What this means, is that when you record from 96 electrodes simultaneously, many of the neurons picked up by the array are correlated, such that the resulting dimensionality is much lower than the number of neurons

3) An important step forward will be to develope optogenetic (or other) sensory write in, using pulses of light to activate neutrons in specific patterns that mimic priprioceptive signals from your limbs. This will increase the speed and robustness of movent via faster closed loop feedback.

4) Processing power. Currently it's typical to run decoders on real-time PC's. Creating an embedded processor capable of sufficiently low power operation with enough processing power to run the decode is non-trivial, especially if you want to implant this in the brain.

It is very unlikely, as suggested elsewhere, that current web tech will impact BMI research at all. The primary interesting tech is in the decode algorithm, which is a modified form of the Kalman filter. There is, however, a lot of room for hackers in research. I recently made the switch from working in defense, building robots and designing sensor fusion algorithms, to a phd in neuroscience. Probably won't pay as well long term, but it's far more rewarding and interesting! I'm surrounded by scientists that need better (software and hardware) tools and analysis methods. Also, an infusion of ideas and values aligned with open access publishing (or changing the scientific publishing model altogether), open source software, data and code sharing, etc. would generally benefit all and accelerate scientific research, but that's another topic worthy of more discussion elsewhere.

By thinking about moving her own paralyzed arm, one woman in the experiment used an artificial limb to serve herself coffee for the first time in 15 years.

Seeing her smile at the end of that video just made my otherwise terrible day rather special. And it's such great validation for the team that's working on this technology, I hope they continue to see much success in the future.