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Bloomberg

Ian Burkhart was just 19 when he had an accident that left most of his body paralysed. “I kept asking the doctors, ‘Is there anything that you guys have heard of that will be able to help?’” he said. As it turns out, there is.
NeuroLife is an experimental device that can best be described as an artificial link between brain and body.
It’s one of a number of paralysis-reversing endeavours underway in which brain waves are decoded and used to move a paralysed limb, either by a robotic prosthetic or direct electrical stimulation.
The device was developed at Battelle, a decades-old applied-science non-profit in Columbus, Ohio, which helped create the Xerox machine, cruise control and no-melt chocolate.


When Battelle needed a test subject for NeuroLife in 2012, Ian was a lucky find: still young with strong muscles – and willing to have a chip implanted in his brain.
Part of the housing protrudes from his skull, allowing him to be plugged in as if he were a character in The Matrix.
“Independence is my No. 1 goal,” Burkhart, now 27, said.
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“I rely on other people to help me every single day – to help me get dressed, get transferred into my wheelchair, brush my hair. So any bit of independence that I can gain back for myself is huge.”
For now, NeuroLife is confined to the lab.
The system is too bulky to be portable and requires an hour of work by two specialists to get up and running. But Battelle hopes to turn it into a portable, commercially available product within five to seven years.

“The ultimate goal of this project is to develop and mature this technology to a point where someone can actually take it home with them and use it for their activities of daily living,” said Dr. Gaurav Sharma, lead investigator on the study.
“Ideally, the brain-computer interface will be wireless, and there will not be a cord coming out of Ian’s head. I also envision that we will be able to make our algorithms more portable and able to run on a small tablet, or even your phone.”
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Farther out, the NeuroLife team hopes to be able to incorporate touch feedback, so users can feel how hard they’re gripping an object.
Burkhart has even greater hopes.
“Working toward different muscle groups in different parts of your body – and just being able to control more of your body that I thought I had lost forever – is something that’s really exciting,” he said.


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Wellness

NeuroLife, the brain implant that can ‘cure’ paralysis

Ian Burkhart plays a guitar video game as part of a study with neural bypass technology. A computer chip in Burkhart`s brain reads his thoughts, decodes them, then sends signals to a sleeve on his arm that allows him to move his hand. Photo: Ohio State University/Batelle Memorial Institute

In this handout picture obtained from the journal "Nature" on April 13, 2016 shows Ian Burkhart, 24, who was paralyzed from the shoulders down after a diving accident in 2010, undertaking tasks after regaining the use of his hand through the use of neural bypass technology at the Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center. Six years after a diving accident left him paralysed, Ian Burkhart can use his right hand, controlled by his mind and aided by computer software, to stir his own coffee, a groundbreaking trial reported on April 13, 2016. The feat was made possible with a pea-sized chip in the 24-year-old's head to decypher his brain signals and rerouting them to the finger, hand and wrist muscles -- bypassing the damaged spinal cord.The muscles are stimulated by an electrode sleeve worn on the right forearm, with which Burkhart can now also swipe a credit card, grasp a container and pour from it, and play the cords of a guitar video game. / AFP PHOTO / NATURE PUBLISHING GROUP AND AF

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NeuroLife, developed by the institute that helped create the Xerox machine, is the latest paralysis-reversing endeavour to use decoded brain waves to move a paralysed limb
