Robotics applied to medicine is going through its best years, as new and modern solutions are emerging that improve the lives of patients with some mobility problem, this through prostheses and exoskeletons.
Today there are a lot of projects that seek to evolve the use of prostheses, where the goal is that the patient can use it naturally and just think, as if it were one of its members. Here the use of brain implants has been decisive, but now a team of researchers has created a kind of helmet that will make this task easier.
We just need to think that it is our arm
Researchers from the University of Minnesota are publishing an important advance in the matter of neuronal interfaces, this when creating a system that allows to control a robotic arm using only thoughts and without the need of a surgical intervention.
It is the first project that uses a non-invasive brain-computer interface (BCI), which consists of a helmet with an electroencephalography (EEG) configuration based on 64 electrodes that record the electrical activity of the brain. The key to everything is in a machine learning system that allows you to process the signal to later decode it and translate it into movements in the robotic arm.
In the first tests a group of volunteers was asked to move a cursor on the screen of a computer. Later they made the leap to the physical world so that the arm was able to hold various objects on a table to take them to a shelf. The results were very encouraging since everyone managed to move the arm in a simple way, however, the precision ranged between 70 and 80%, plus there are still some seconds of delay between thought and action.
It is undoubtedly a fascinating project that could benefit thousands of people who have suffered some amputation or are paraplegic or quadriplegic, since one of the requirements to use this system is that the patient has ever had the member or mobility in it . The project is still in the development stage and there is no tentative date to see it in commercial applications, since before it is necessary that the costs decrease and that some details be perfected.