The suit that Nicolelis helped build in the laboratoryBIGBONSAI + LENTEVIVA FILMESJuliano Pinto, a 29-year-old Brazilian man, wore a robotic suit that worked via a brain-machine interface (BMI) and nudged a soccer ball with his foot, sending it rolling down a short mat in Sao Paulo’s Corinthians Arena yesterday (June 12). The gesture was small, but it was the culmination of years of research, carried out by dozens of scientists studying BMIs. And it was the ceremonial first kick of soccer’s World Cup, which got underway with a match between host nation Brazil and Croatia (Brazil won 3-1).
“We did it!!!!” tweeted Miguel Nicolelis, the Duke University neuroscientist who headed the team of researchers that worked on the project. Seven other paralyzed people who had trained alongside Pinto watched from the sidelines. “It was a great team effort, and I would like to especially highlight the eight patients who devoted themselves intensively to this day,” Nicolelis said in a statement from the Walk Again Project, the international consortium of researchers and funders behind the work. “It was up to Juliano to wear the exoskeleton, but all of them made that shot. It was a big score by these people and by our science.”
Pinto’s suit included an electroencephalogram (EEG) cap containing electrodes that magnified nervous impulses from his brain and sent them to ...
