A group of researchers and doctors from France managed to teach a person who was completely paralyzed below the neck to mentally control the movements of an exoskeleton. Sensors were implanted into his brain that transmitted motor commands to the suit. As a result, a 28-year-old Frenchman named Thibault was able to walk over 100 meters and perform simple hand movements. The authors described their work in the medical journal The Lancet.
The French biotechnology center Clinatec, together with the University Hospital of Grenoble, recruited two paralyzed patients to the experiment. One of them was dropped from the program due to technical problems. The second was implanted with two sensors in the sensorimotor areas of the brain. After a spinal injury in the neck area as a result of falling from a balcony, his arms and legs were completely paralyzed.
Motor signals from the brain were processed in real time using an adaptive algorithm that tried to decode the direction of the desired movement. In order to achieve sufficient accuracy in the interpretation of brain signals, the patient had to train the mental control of the system for two years. The training took place in the form of a computer game - the patient's task was to make the person on the screen move his arms and legs, CNN reports.
In June 2019, Thibault managed to establish contact with the program that controlled the walking and hand movements of the exoskeleton. The patient achieved success in 60-70% of cases. In total, he has so far managed to walk about 145 meters inside the laboratory.
Thibault admitted that "he will not be able to go home tomorrow in his exoskeleton." However, taking the first steps in a suit, he felt like "the first man on the moon", according to the BBC.