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From Smithsonian Magazine's Surprising Science column:
A New Interface Lets Monkeys Control Two Virtual Arms With Their Brain Alone
A representation of a virtual monkey, whose arms can be manipulated by a real monkey in a new brain-machine interface—the first interface that allows for the control of multiple limbs. Image via Duke Center for Neuroengineering
Brain-machine interfaces were once the stuff of science fiction. But the technology—which enables direct communication between a person or animal’s brain and an external device or another brain—has come a long way in the past decade.*M.D and PhD, hence the double Doc.
Scientists have developed interfaces that allow paralyzed people to type letters on a screen, let one person move another’s hand with his or her thoughts and even make it possible for two rats to trade thoughts—in this case, the knowledge of how to solve a particular task—when they’re located in labs thousands of miles apart.
Now, a team led by Miguel Nicolelis of Duke University (the scientist behind the rat thought-trading scheme, among other brain-machine interfaces) has created a new setup that allows monkeys to control two virtual arms simply by thinking about moving their real arms. They hope that the technology, revealed in a paper published today in Science Translational Medicine, could someday lead to similar interfaces that allow paralyzed humans to move robotic arms and legs.
Previously, Nicolelis’ team and others had created interfaces that allowed monkeys and humans to move a single arm in a similar fashion, but this is the first technology that lets an animal to move multiple limbs simultaneously. “Bimanual movements in our daily activities—from typing on a keyboard to opening a can—are critically important,” Nicolelis said in a press statement. “Future brain-machine interfaces aimed at restoring mobility in humans will have to incorporate multiple limbs to greatly benefit severely paralyzed patients.”
Like the group’s previous interfaces, the new technology relies upon ultra thin electrodes that are surgically embedded into the cerebral cortex of monkeys’ brains, a region of the brain that controls voluntary movements, among other functions. But unlike many other brain-machine interfaces, which use electrodes that monitor brain activity in just a handful of neurons, Nicolelis’ team recorded activity in nearly 500 brain cells distributed over a range of cortex areas in the two rhesus monkeys who were test subjects for this study....MORE
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