Breakthrough for brain-controlled robotics - FT.com Cathy, who was completely paralysed by a stroke 15 years ago, thought about having a drink of coffee. A robotic arm responded by moving her drinking bottle from a nearby table up to her mouth so that she could sip through the straw. The remarkable experiment in brain technology was the first time since the stroke that 58-year-old Cathy had drunk without help from a carer. IN Science "The smile on her face was a remarkable thing to see," said Leigh Hochberg, a professor of neuro-engineering at Brown University in Rhode Island. All of us involved were encouraged that the research is making the kind of progress that we had all hoped for. Cathy was one of two tetraplegic patients taking part in a clinical trial of the BrainGate brain-computer interface developed at Brown, with funding from the US National Institutes of Health and other federal agencies. The other was a 66-year-old man called Bob. Both learnt to move a robotic arm in three dimensions and pick up objects, by imagining the movements of their own paralysed arms and hands. The results, reported in this Friday's edition of the journal Nature, describe the most complex functions anyone has performed using a brain-computer interface. Previous research has enabled people to control a cursor on a computer screen and a simpler robotic device. "Years after the onset of paralysis, we found that it was still possible to record brain signals that carry multi-dimensional information about movement and that those signals could be used to move an external device," Prof Hochberg said. It was not a difficult task for the volunteers. Bob, who can only move his eyelids and communicates by blinking as people show him individual letters of the alphabet, described his control of the robot: "I just imagined moving my own arm and the [robotic] arm moved where I wanted it to go." BrainGate has a sensor, about the size of a small aspirin pill, with 100 hair-thin electrodes. It is implanted into the top of the motor cortex, the brain area that controls movement. The sensor is connected to an external computer that translates the patient's neural activity into commands to drive a robot. The trial is using two different robots. One is made by Germany's DLR Institute for Robotics and Mechatronics in Cologne. The other comes from DEKA, a US research and development company in Manchester, New Hampshire. The researchers emphasise that their technology is still several years from practical use. Cathy and Bob used BrainGate under controlled conditions with a technician constantly present to calibrate. Another limitation is that the sensor is still connected to the rest of the system by wires. The future lies in developing a fully automated, wireless brain-computer interface. This could be connected to bionic arms and hands, or legs and feet, for people whose limbs are missing. But the ultimate goal for helping people with paralysis is to bypass damaged nerves and reconnect the brain directly to their own limbs. A functional electrical stimulation (FES) device would then activate paralysed muscles.