Similar experiments have taken place in the United States and Germany, but they involved either able-bodied patients or invasive brain implants.
On Tuesday, a team at Switzerland's Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne used only a simple head cap to record the brain signals of Mark-Andre Duc, who was at a hospital in the southern Swiss town of Sion 100 km (62 miles) away.
Duc's thoughts—or rather, the electrical signals emitted by his brain when he imagined lifting his paralyzed fingers—were decoded almost instantly by a laptop at the hospital. The resulting instructions—left or right—were then transmitted to a foot-tall robot scooting around the Lausanne lab.
Duc lost control of his legs and fingers in a fall and is now considered partially quadriplegic. He said controlling the robot wasn't hard on a good day.
"But when I'm in pain it becomes more difficult," he told The Associated Press through a video link screen on a second laptop attached to the robot.
Background noise caused by pain or even a wandering mind has emerged as a major challenge in the research of so-called brain-computer interfaces since they first began to be tested on humans more than a decade ago, said Jose Millan, who led the Swiss team.
কোন মন্তব্য নেই:
একটি মন্তব্য পোস্ট করুন