Comments on: First mind-controlled leg prothesis

By: dagautier

dagautier — Sun, 11 Nov 2012 16:15:25 +0000

Thanks for this very interesting post, I used it in one of mine about prosthetic legs.
http://dagautier.tumblr.com/post/35304983670/reparer-augmenter-hacker

By: melajara

melajara — Tue, 11 Sep 2012 08:21:36 +0000

Indeed, this makes perfectly sense. And don’t forget the contribution of the peripheral nervous system to relay and aggregate nerve signalling, this is also superseded by the RoGo here.

Now I much prefer the organic repair approach, backed by stem cells research, and innovative biotech startups, like e.g. http://www.stemcellsinc.com/

By: Editor

Editor — Mon, 10 Sep 2012 23:05:39 +0000

Good question. It would be ideal to pick up the signals that the brain sends to the spinal cord and use those signals directly to control the RoGo (robotic gait orthosis) device (similar to wiring around the fault in an electrical circuit). But as I understand it, that would involve highly invasive (and dangerous) surgery to tap into either the cerebellum (which controls muscles, and is buried deep in the brain, so there’s no way to pick up its signals directly) or higher up on the spinal cord, and such a procedure would confine the patient to a hospital bed in a research lab — that sorta defeats the purpose of enabling them to walk :) (http://www.csuchico.edu/~pmccaffrey/syllabi/CMSD%20320/362unit7.html has a good diagram that makes this clear).

Also, I don’t know of any research in using such signals for RoGo (but I could be wrong about that).

So instead, the non-invasive BCI-RoGo system converts the EEG signal via signal processing and pattern recognition algorithms (effectively simulating what happens in the cerebellum and spinal cord) into a simulated neural signal, which is sent to the muscle. Does that make sense?

(I welcome any corrections from neuroscientists or physicians.)

By: SyntaxHD

SyntaxHD — Mon, 10 Sep 2012 17:00:33 +0000

So in other words, they bypassed the spinal cord as transmission device and sent the signals straight down to the leg muscles via EEG brain-reading technics? Why is it necessary to stimulate the muscles at all, when the brainsignals can be directly transported to the leg robot device?
Have I missunderstood something here?

By: Editor

Editor — Mon, 10 Sep 2012 14:28:38 +0000

John, this particular work was restricted to spinal cord injury.

By: john lynch

john lynch — Mon, 10 Sep 2012 14:18:27 +0000

This should help in mind control of vascular Parkinson’s