Ian Burkhart was 19 years old and enjoying a day at the beach when an accident occurred. Ian describes that fateful day:
“I was playing in the waves in the ocean. I dove into a wave which pushed me down into a sandbar where I snapped my neck. I injured my spinal cord at the C-5 level which means I have pretty good function of my biceps but no function from about my elbows down. So, I can move my arm around but I can’t move my hands or anything below that."
Now, Burkhart is a quadriplegic and is confined to a wheelchair most of the day. “The hardest thing for me being a quadriplegic is my loss of independence," he said. "There are a lot of things I need to ask someone for help with now.”
But now Burkhart is helping researchers develop technology that could get him moving again.
“Neurobridge is a technology we’ve developed to link brain activity directly to movement," said Chad Bouton, a research leader at Battelle, the world’s largest nonprofit research and development organization.
The technology reads a person's thoughts to help move paralyzed muscles, all thanks to a computer chip surgically embedded in the motor cortex, the brain region responsible for movement. This chip has electrodes that detect the electrical signals produced when neurons fire in the motor cortex.
In Burkhart’s case, these neurons are still sending the same signals they always did, but his spinal injury prevents the signals from getting where they ought to go. The chip in Burkhart’s brain acts like a detour, detecting these signals and sending them out to a computer.
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23 июн 2015
