Professor Florian Solzbacher, from Blackrock Neurotech, explains how brain-computer interface (BCI) technology can help spinal injury patients to move and feel again.
Spinal cord injury is one of the most profound physical and emotional challenges that a human being can experience. In addition to losing the ability to walk or the full range of motion in their body, these patients also lose their sense of touch. Many spinal cord injury patients have told me that this loss is particularly difficult and perceived as almost more important than their sense of seeing or hearing. What if there were a way to help these patients regain their sensation of touch and begin to reconnect with the world?
My company, Blackrock Neurotech, collaborated with our partners at the University of Pittsburgh’s Rehab Neural Engineering Labs in a groundbreaking study to reach this exact goal. For the first time ever, Blackrock’s NeuroPort System of brain-computer interface (BCI) technology helped a patient with tetraplegia use a bidirectional prosthetic arm to reconnect with tactile sensory information. Not only can this patient move their prosthetic arm, but they can also feel what they are touching.
The research has recently been published in Science Magazine, under the title: “A brain-computer interface that evokes tactile sensations improves robotic arm control.”
This study is a massive breakthrough in the next evolution of treatment for spinal cord injury and I’m excited to share more information here about the results of it, and how this technology can potentially help millions of people to move and feel again.
The study: Sense of touch in a robotic arm
In previous research, the Rehab Neural Engineering Labs demonstrated how a BCI system could enable a patient to use a robotic arm to make reaching and grasping movements. However, the previous study’s BCI control of the arm relied on visual cues and lacked critical sensory feedback.
This new study is important, and groundbreaking, because the BCI did not just enable movement, but also touch. Artificial tactile percepts were enabled using sensors in the robotic hand that responded to object contact and grasp force. It also triggered electrical stimulation pulses in sensory regions of the participant's brain.
This is the first time that this kind of device -- a bi-directional brain-computer interface – has allowed feedback of sensory information. The patient can actually feel what they’re touching. And the academic paper is supporting the hypothesis that this is actually possible.
Technology behind the study: Exchanging information with the brain
One important aspect of the technology used in this study is that it created a two-way exchange of information between the patient’s brain and the prosthetic arm. Not only could the patient use his brain to move the arm, but the patient also received signals back from the prosthetic arm.
Blackrock Neurotech, our team and collaborators have been doing research and developing technology in this area for almost 20 years. In the early days, some people in our field believed that spinal cord injury patients had no more brain signals available to recover lost function, and that after a certain amount of time has elapsed from the injury, it is not possible to regain control or sensation. But using our products, together with our clinical and research collaborators it was possible to demonstrate that even after years have passed since the injury, the relevant brain signals can still be there.
It’s one thing to have a brain-computer interface to convey information that’s processed in the brain to control movement, but this is only one direction of how information travels. There’s also the sensory aspect of information traveling back to the brain – touch, pressure, temperature, and other aspects. This new study is seminal because, for the first time in a human subject, we have a penetrating implantable cortical device that shows we can help restore the sense of touch.
Ultimate aim: Collaboration for bigger progress in helping patients
Our ultimate goal is to help patients regain function and improve their quality of life across a large spectrum of neurological disorders and dysfunctions due to e.g. disease or injury. Our team at Blackrock Neurotech works in a collaborative way with brilliant researchers like the team at University of Pittsburgh and other labs. We’re focused on getting results and expanding the capabilities of this field, and we believe in collaborative interactions to enable us all to make progress.
If you look at all the major quantum leaps in science and engineering, they all came from collaboration. There’s never one person who makes the big breakthrough: it comes from a larger and interdisciplinary team whose priority is always the patient and achieving a goal together.
Advancements in spinal cord injury treatment
This study is promising on all levels -- not only from the patient, but also from a scientific and academic point of view. Previous research suggested that this kind of technology could work, but to see it in a human subject and hear that person say “Yes, I can feel this” – this is a huge step.
This is an exciting moment in the treatment of spinal cord injury. We are at an inflection point. There is accelerating innovation and more capital being invested, and the frequency of world-first developments in human subjects is increasing, year after year. The best ideas and solutions will percolate to the top, and we can all learn from each other and push the technology forward to help patients.
People have dreamed of these advances for decades. Thirty years ago, when I was a teenager, my mother worked as a physical therapist for people with spinal cord injuries, and I remember thinking, “I wish we could develop better help for these people.”
I believe that within my lifetime, we will see brain-computer interface technology for spinal cord and other injuries and diseases that will become something as common and easy to obtain as pacemakers for heart disease are today. I am lucky and grateful to be working in this field with so many talented people, like our team at University of Pittsburgh and all over the world, at a moment when so many exciting advancements are becoming possible.
