Is it possible to have a robotic arm

The researchers then decoded his intentions to move by recording brain activity from individual electrodes while he imagined specific movements. And when they switched on the current to specific electrodes in his sensory system, he felt it.

Once they had established that Copeland could experience these sensations, and that the researchers knew which brain areas to stimulate to create feeling in different parts of his hands, the next step was just to get Copeland used to controlling the robot arm. He and the research team set up a training room at the lab, hanging up posters of Pac Man and cat memes. Three days a week, a researcher would hook the electrode connector from his scalp to a suite of cables and computers, and then they would time him as he grasped blocks and spheres, moving them from left to right.

Over a couple years, he got pretty damn good. He even demonstrated the system for then president Barack Obama. Copeland could sometimes do it in six seconds, but his median time was around To get him over the hump, it was time to try giving him real-time touch feedback from the robot arm.

Human fingers sense pressure, and the resulting electrical signals zip along thread-like axons from the hand to the brain. The team mirrored that sequence by putting sensors on the robotic fingertips. The robotic fingers want to stay put unless the BCI is telling them to move. Any nudge forward or back along the length of the finger will register a rotational force at that hinge.

When he gripped a hard block, the firm resistance occurring at the robotic joint gave him a stronger sensation. For the first time, he could feel his way through the robot tasks. In fact, with this new touch information, Copeland doubled his speed completing mobility tasks. I have it in my hand? I'm sure that I have it in? So now I can pick it up and move it. The brain operates with a lag of about 30 milliseconds the time it takes for impulses to travel from hand to brain.

But the robot communicates signals to the BCI every 20 milliseconds. And that feeling registers much faster than sight. Now I want you to take a moment to kind of envision what you're going to do, and I'm going to say, and go. Every distinct movement that I try to make fires a different array of muscles, creating a unique pattern.

It's not unlike training voice recognition software. A word of explanation. Like most amputees, I feel my missing limb as if it was still there. It's an omnipresent phantom. In my case, it feels as if my arm is bound up in a sling, partially asleep and often painful.

Paresthesia is the medical term. If I focus carefully, I can move my missing hand and fingers partially and slowly. After only a few minutes of training the arm to understand the language of my muscles came a magical moment for me. It was nothing short of thrilling. For the first time since I lost my arm, it occurred to me that technology might one day restore nearly all the function I lost.

And ready, and go. And rest. And open again. Ready, and go. There it is. And now we're going to close. But I was erratic, and soon found the limits of my ability to move my missing hand, and thus the artificial one. All right, now I want you to close your eyes. I want you to fully rest, yoga breaths here.

And then there we go. Again, all of this down at the wrist and hand is controls that you theoretically should not have intuitively that you do. So, awesome. It's essentially rewiring electrical information that wasn't previously accessible to a way that we can now record it from, not only record from, but have a natural amplifier to those muscles and then record from it in a noninvasive means.

Putting on the prosthetic arm, in the beginning, it was basically the same as with any prosthetic arm. If after that — the sensors starts, you know, picking up this, and then you start seeing, you know, how the hand moves in fluid motion and all this kind of stuff, that's when the world really starts separating itself.

You go into operating a prosthetic just by thinking. I'm doing the moves. That was just truly amazing. It's just an all-natural control, just like your normal hand and stuff. We have had actually patients, after targeted muscle reinnovation, have individual finger control. We have interfaced with gaming programs such as "Guitar Hero. But it's hard to play the guitar without a sense of touch. The arm has sensors in its fingertips that are able to offer sensory feedback.

Making that information available and useful to an amputee is the next big challenge in the world of advanced prosthetics. Being able to noninvasively control robotic devices using only thoughts will have broad applications, in particular benefiting the lives of paralyzed patients and those with movement disorders.

BCIs have been shown to achieve good performance for controlling robotic devices using only the signals sensed from brain implants. When robotic devices can be controlled with high precision, they can be used to complete a variety of daily tasks. Until now, however, BCIs successful in controlling robotic arms have used invasive brain implants. These implants require a substantial amount of medical and surgical expertise to correctly install and operate, not to mention cost and potential risks to subjects, and as such, their use has been limited to just a few clinical cases.

A grand challenge in BCI research is to develop less invasive or even totally noninvasive technology that would allow paralyzed patients to control their environment or robotic limbs using their own "thoughts. However, BCIs that use noninvasive external sensing, rather than brain implants, receive "dirtier" signals, leading to current lower resolution and less precise control. Thus, when using only the brain to control a robotic arm, a noninvasive BCI doesn't stand up to using implanted devices.

Despite this, BCI researchers have forged ahead, their eye on the prize of a less- or non-invasive technology that could help patients everywhere on a daily basis. It's excellent science," says He. Advances in neural decoding and the practical utility of noninvasive robotic arm control will have major implications on the eventual development of noninvasive neurorobotics.