A Swiss research team reported in Nature this week that they wired a monkey to walk again on a leg that had been paralyzed, a mere six days after the paralyzing spinal cord injury. The treatment? A brain-computer interface connecting the monkey’s motor cortex to an electrical stimulation device on the spine. With the device, signals from the brain are translated to pulses on the spine, giving the limbs instructions to move despite the interruption of signals in the spine itself.
FES Center Investigator, Bolu Ajiboye, PhD, was a guest on Science Friday for the discussion on this topic.
