In July 2021, neurosurgeon Jocelyne Bloch cut circular holes, 5cm in diameter, on each side of Gert-Jan Oskam’s skull, directly above the brain regions that control movement. Into them she placed two disc-shaped implants. Oskam, a 40-year-old Dutchman, had been paralysed in a cycling accident 12 years earlier.
The discs read his intentions and send them wirelessly to two sensors on a helmet. An algorithm built by the Swiss team converts those signals into commands for the muscles of his legs and feet. The commands travel through a second implant that Bloch fitted around his spinal cord and attached to the nerve endings involved in walking. Between them, the two devices skip past the damaged stretch of his cervical spinal cord.
What changed in a year
Oskam was not starting from zero. He had earlier regained some walking ability with a front-wheel walker, but for three years before the trial he had hit what researchers call a “neurological recovery plateau.”
After a few weeks of training with the implants he could stand and walk with a walker. Over 12 months, the system let him walk and stand more naturally, without the wearable motion sensors that earlier versions of the technology needed. It also let him climb stairs and cross steep ramps, both beyond him before.
The gains outlasted the hardware. After a year of therapy with the devices, he could walk with crutches even when they were switched off. According to the researchers, that suggests some of his neurons reorganised and rebuilt communication on their own.
Prof Grégoire Courtine of EPFL, who led the project, described a wireless interface “between the brain and the spinal cord using brain-computer interface (BCI) technology that transforms thought into action.” The key is a set of artificial intelligence algorithms that adapt and learn from the user. Oskam had to train the model so it could match particular thoughts with particular movements.
That step went quickly. “The patient has first to learn how to work with his brain signals, and we also have to learn how to correlate these brain signals to the spinal cord stimulation,” Bloch said. “This is pretty short: in a few sessions, everything is linked.”
Limits
The results come from one person, and the approach will not suit every kind of spinal cord injury. Bloch stressed that the system remains at a basic research stage and is many years from reaching paralysed patients, though she told BBC News the team wants to move it from the lab to the clinic as quickly as it can.
The equipment is bulky. Patients use it for an hour or so, a few times a week, as part of recovery. Courtine’s spin-out company, Onward Medical, is working to shrink the technology and commercialise it for daily use. The work was published in the journal Nature.
“It’s coming,” Courtine said. “Gert-Jan received the implant 10 years after his accident. Imagine when we apply our brain-spine interface a few weeks after the injury.”
Sources
- Brain implants help paralysed man to walk again
- Brain And Spine Implants Restore Movement in a Man Paralyzed by an Accident
Sources
- Brain implants help paralysed man to walk again
- Brain And Spine Implants Restore Movement in a Man Paralyzed by…
