This week saw a paper published by a German, Italian, Swiss, and American academic team regarding a successful research project where three participants with tetraplegic spinal-cord injuries (paralyzed from the shoulders down) successfully controlled an electric wheelchair with their minds. This included navigating, steering, turning, and controlling the speed of the chair through a hospital obstacle course with an impressive 95 to 98% accuracy.
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https://www.cell.com/iscience/fulltext/S2589-0042(22)01690-X
This research matters for several reasons.
1. Up to now, people have had to undergo RISKY surgical insertion of electrical implants into the motor regions of their brains for this sort of machine control.
2. This is the only study of its kind not limited to able-bodied subjects. You read that right, most studies fail to use the people who would be the tech’s end users.
3. It involved an intensive and long period of training and skill development in ways that apply to a real-world setting.
Participants wore an electrode-covered cap that recorded brain electrical activity, otherwise known as an electroencephalogram (EEG). An amplifying device sent these electrical signals to a computer that interpreted the intentions, turning them into movement.
The boost to 98% from original scores of 43 to 55% was a result of improvements in the computer’s ability to decode the brain activity patterns; the #AI got smarter.
This is a great example of cross-institutional collaboration.