Hypothesis for mechanism of neurological improvement in spinal cord injury patientsA.R.C. DONATI ET AL., SCIENTIFIC REPORTSParaplegic patients who regularly trained with brain-machine interfaces (BMI) to walk in a virtual world or articulate an exoskeleton using their brains have regained some sensation and voluntary muscle control at sites below the spinal cord lesions that caused their paralysis, according to an international team of researchers. The scientists—among them the researchers who enabled a paralyzed man to execute the opening kick of the 2014 World Cup—reported the results of an eight-person trial in Scientific Reports today (August 11).
“Nobody ever imagined that one day we would be talking about the possibility of using brain-machine interfaces to induce partial neurological recovery in patients who have been diagnosed as having complete spinal cord injury,” study coauthor Miguel Nicolelis of the Duke University Medical Center told reporters during a conference call.
Nicolelis and colleagues had been studying the potential of a BMI-driven exoskeleton to give eight paralyzed people the ability to walk. But as the researchers trained the patients to manipulate either avatars in a virtual reality context or the exoskeleton for around an hour per day, twice a week, they noticed that some voluntary muscle movements and sensation returned to areas below the sites of the participants’ spinal cord lesions. “Our goal was simply to ...
