Brain Implant Allows Man to Control Robotic Arm With His Mind

The future is now. A new discovery has led a man who was paralysed to now being able to have a normal life.

Doctors at the University of Southern California implanted small chips into Sorto's brain during a five-hour surgery in 2013 into brain of Erik Sorto that decoded his thoughts to move the free-standing robotic arm. The sensors recorded the electrical activity of about 100 brain cells as Sorto imagined reaching and grasping.

A team of scientists led by Tyson Aflalo and Richard Andersen at California Institute of Technology have glean intention directly from neural activity with implantable chips-and can use robotic limbs to act out those urges.

They report on their research with Sorto in a new study out in Science today.

"When you move your arm, you really don't think about which muscles to activate and the details of the movement -- such as lift the arm, extend the arm, grasp the cup, close the hand around the cup, and so on. Instead, you think about the goal of the movement. For example, 'I want to pick up that cup of water,'" Andersen says. "So in this trial, we were successfully able to decode these actual intents, by asking the subject to simply imagine the movement as a whole, rather than breaking it down into a myriad components."

The project is actually a collaboration of different clinics and institutes. Mr. Sorto's prosthetics was made by Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland, while the neural chips were made from the University of Utah.

This is huge breakthrough not just in the field of medical science but of robotics too. Further studies are in order, as the team say, to even consider this as a viable public health option, but so far, it's still a great leap- especially for Mr. Sorto.

"I joke around with the guys that I want to be able to drink my own beer, to be able to take a drink at my own pace, when I want to take a sip out of my beer and to not have to ask somebody to give it to me. I really miss that independence. I think that if it were safe enough, I would really enjoy grooming myself - shaving, brushing my own teeth. That would be fantastic," he added.