Professor Zheng Xiaoxiang, who leads the neurocomputer interface group at the University of Zhejiang Province, East China, announced at the end of February that it had been successful in building brain-computer interfaces. They allow you to control electronics directly by "power of thought".
Small sensors implanted in the monkey's brain make it possible not only to control a mechanical hand as if it were one's own, but also to move individual “fingers” (which was previously impossible to achieve), to take, for example, some objects.
Professor Zheng's group is working with a five-year-old monkey named Jianhui. At the first stage, scientists recorded electrical impulses corresponding to each movement of the animal, thus compiling a kind of dictionary, comparing "thoughts about movement" and these movements themselves. The sensor for reading information was made in the form of a grid of 200 tiny electrodes. Each electrode picks up a specific signal generated by only one neuron in the monkey brain.
Then all this data is transmitted to a computer, which is engaged in a detailed analysis of neural activity. Comparing the general picture of activation with those already known, the computer decides what exactly the manipulator should do, what signals to send to the output.
During the experiments, Jianhui gestured with his own limbs, while a mechanical hand, located half a meter from Jianhui, repeated the same movements. For the correct execution of a particular task, the monkey received encouragement - a drink flowed down a straw into its mouth.
According to Professor Zheng, for a more accurate deciphering of the movements of each monkey and human hand, it is necessary to analyze the response of at least 10 thousand motor (effector) neurons that control these actions (or even hundreds of thousands), so there is still a lot of work to be done to fully decipher this brain activity. However, even 200 electrodes are sufficient to read key data, accurately interpret the movement of the monkey, and control the mechanical arm. Which cannot but inspire.
“This new advance in brain-computer interface design not only gives us hope to develop fully-fledged artificial limbs over time, but also helps us begin to decipher the so-called brain code, to create biofeedback models,” said Professor Zheng. In the future, such technologies will be useful both for people with disabilities, that is, patients with severe motor impairments, and for computer operators working in difficult conditions, and even for just fans of computer games who would like to get their hands on an unusual interface.
Promotional video:
Of course, such studies are not new in themselves. The achievements of American and Japanese groups are widely known, which worked both with animals and with people - patients of clinics, who learned to operate prostheses with the power of thought. In the mid-1990s, with the help of devices that transmit information from person to computer, it was possible to some extent to restore the damaged functions of hearing, vision, and lost motor skills. However, Zheng argues that until now, no one has been able to master fine motor skills and correctly interpret the movements of individual fingers.
In Russia, research on the creation of brain-computer interfaces is being actively pursued by several groups at once. Demonstrations of actually working systems are held from time to time. Anyone can see this, for example, at the annual Science Festival at Lomonosov Moscow State University. There their developments are usually presented by scientists of the Faculty of Biology (Alexander Kaplan's group).
But the question of how realistic is the use of these devices for the rehabilitation of disabled people, there is still no clear answer. The fact is that the developers are forced to focus on a standard healthy organism (to interpret the reactions of which electronics are already quite capable of). And each specific patient requires a purely individual approach and, probably, reconfiguring the interface. How to cope with all these difficulties is not yet clear.