Healthy living
Mind matters
Mind over matter
Brain chip holds promise for people with epilepsy and those who have lost a limb
People who have lost an arm or a leg may soon be able to control artificial limbs by the power of thought alone. It sounds like science fiction, but scientists in the US are developing a tiny chip that can be implanted in the brain where it will interpret brain signals and then send commands wirelessly to prosthetics.
The revolutionary brain implants could also be used to prevent epileptic seizures, according to the findings published in the Journal of Neuroscience Methods.
“We really feel like if we can do this, we’ll have the technology to offer new options for patients,” said Justin Sanchez, director of the University of Florida Neuroprosthetics Research Group and an assistant professor of paediatric neurology, neuroscience and biomedical engineering.
“There’s kind of a revolution going on right now in the neurosciences and biomedical engineering. People are trying to take engineering approaches for directly interfacing with the brain.”
The goal is to develop a chip that would be implanted directly into the brain tissue, from where it would gather data from signals, decode them and stimulate the brain.
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