Name: This Brain Implant Could Change Lives
Uploaded: 2020-04-15T16:01:18.000Z
Duration: 7 min 1 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Adverbs of degree

I had just finished my freshman year of college.

I was out in the ocean and I dove out and into a wave,

Past perfect

something I had done many times   before.

I dove into a sandbar that had drifted in,

which fractured my spine and damaged my spinal cord,

I kept asking the doctors, what can I look forward to in the future?

One of my doctors said, hey, we want to try this muscle stimulation device.

It really sounds like it's something out of a science fiction novel:

Spinal trauma is one of the toughest problems in medicine.

There's currently no biological way of healing severe damage to the spinal cord.

Recently, scientists have started developing a workaround: creating an artificial link

GAURAV SHARMA: My name is Gaurav Sharma, I'm the lead investigator on the NeuroLife program

So NeuroLife is an electronic neural bypass technology that can link the brain directly

We are developing this technology for people with paralysis due to spinal cord injury,

so they can regain control of their own hand.

Ian Burkhart is our first patient in this study.

Being injured at the C5 level means that I have pretty good strength through my biceps,

but I don't really have any movement below my elbows at all.

I rely on other people to help me every single day.

They help me get dressed, get transferred into my wheelchair, um, brush my hair;

and then at the end of the day I also need help doing everything in reverse

Independence is my number one goal, and regaining any use of my hands will really improve my

independence, so it was something I was all for.

So this technology has 3 main components.

The first component is a tiny chip that is surgically implanted in Ian's brain, and

that records Ian's brain activity as he's thinking about moving his hand.

GAURAV: The second component is a computer algorithm that decodes Ian's brain activity

and interprets the movement he is thinking about.

And the last component is a wearable sleeve which has up to 160 electrodes, which activates

the individual muscles to evoke the attempted movement.

When I first started with the study, just trying to open and close my hand was

I never had to think about moving my hand, as it was just something that naturally happened.

So it was something that took a lot of mental strength.

But today, with practice, I'm able to pick up an object

and manipulate that around in space; I'm able to move individual fingers; I can do some complex grasps.

You know, we've done everything from picking up a bottle and pouring it,

Just being able to control more of your body that I had thought I had lost forever is something

that's really exciting and really promising.

All right, so I think we're going to need to move some of these things out of the way.

As Ian gets better at using his hand, the researchers give him new challenges.

This is his first time trying this homemade Battleship game,

- Barely had it... - That looked better, I think.

Yeah, I barely had a hold of it and it just slipped in.

That's what happens when you try a new thing though.

I think you were getting bored with everything working easily.

It's probably going to be a while before a system like NeuroLife

restores anything like full functionality.

But it's a first step towards a future where a broken connection between mind and body

For now, Battelle plans to keep refining the system with Ian and other patients, in the

hope of turning NeuroLife into a commercial product within a few years.

The ultimate goal of this project is someone can actually take it home with them,

and use it for their activities of daily living.

We are working very hard on the hardware side to make it portable and wearable, so that

Ian can in the morning wake up, put the sleeve on, and he should be good to go.

If I can help move science so that, in the future, someone with an injury like mine,

they'll be back going on with their lives in a short time, that's something that,