Nathan Copeland , a man from the United States who had suffered a spinal cord injury at the level of the cervical vertebrae as a result of a traffic accident more than a decade ago -when he was 18 years old-, has managed to regain the sensation of touch in his right hand thanks to various chips implanted in his brain.
We are talking about brain microstimulation . The researchers responsible for this experiment, bioengineers and neuroscientists from the University of Pittsburgh (USA) have presented their results at the US White House Frontiers Conference Their intervention, despite being in the experimental phase, it is a tacit advance in the achievement of new therapies for people with partial or complete paralysis.
Previous studies have focused on stimulating the motor signal that goes from the brain to the extremities to control the movement of robotic arms. In this case, efforts were focused on recovering the sensory signal to reestablish the sensation of touch ; that is, getting a robotic system to move and feel like a natural arm.
The four chips implanted in the patient’s brain, the size of a shirt button, were inserted into the somatosensory cortex (two of them) and the motor cortex (the other two chips). Each of the chips is equipped with dozens of one and a half millimeter long microelectrodes to which a small electrical current is supplied, stimulating certain points in the brain.
Although there is still a long way to go, the patient has assessed the sensation of touch as “possibly natural” in 93% of the tests carried out in the laboratory; of the rest, 5% found it a “quite natural” sensation and 2% “quite unnatural”, being able to also distinguish between strong and weak pressures, although not between hot and cold.
The study has been published in the journal Science Translational Medicine.
