Skip to main content

Paralyzed man uses smart sensors to move again just by thinking

Man with quadriplegia employs injury bridging technologies to move again - just by thinking​
Modern technology is pretty darn amazing, but sometimes we need a particularly prominent example to remind us of just how awesome it can be.

That’s what happened this week when Bill Kochevar, a man who has been paralyzed below his shoulders for the past eight years following a bicycling accident, was able to feed himself by using his thoughts to send messages from an implant in his brain to implants in his arm.

In the study, Kochevar underwent surgery to install sensors in his brain’s motor cortex, the part of the brain responsible for hand movement. Over the following four months he then learned to use the sensors to control a 3D virtual arm, before undergoing a second operation to install 36 electrodes in his arm and hand. These electrodes prompted electrical stimulation of muscles in Kochevar’s shoulder, elbow and hand.

Case Western Reserve University Cleveland FES Center
Case Western Reserve University Cleveland FES Center

“This is the first in-man success of a fully implanted brain machine interface (BCI) and functional electrical stimulation to restore function in a fully paralyzed limb in an individual with quadriplegia,” researcher Benjamin Walter, associate professor of neurology at Case Western Reserve School of Medicine, clinical PI of the Cleveland BrainGate2 trial and medical director of the Deep Brain Stimulation Program at UH Cleveland Medical Center, told Digital Trends. “What is amazing about this approach is the technology essentially bypasses the damaged spinal cord and allows the individual to just think about moving his arm and it moves. He has been able to perform functional tasks and move his arm in multiple directions with multiple degrees of freedom.”

Despite the headline-grabbing study, Walter said that the work is still in its relatively early stages, and that the algorithms are being tweaked and improved on a regular basis as a result of the team’s work with Bill Kochevar.

The restorative abilities of the brain machine interface are long-lasting, but work only when the system is hooked up to a computer.

That won’t be the case forever, though. “Eventually this technology will all be wireless or internalized which could allow for more continuous independent use,” Walter concluded.

Editors' Recommendations

Luke Dormehl
I'm a UK-based tech writer covering Cool Tech at Digital Trends. I've also written for Fast Company, Wired, the Guardian…
This AI cloned my voice using just three minutes of audio
acapela group voice cloning ad

There's a scene in Mission Impossible 3 that you might recall. In it, our hero Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) tackles the movie's villain, holds him at gunpoint, and forces him to read a bizarre series of sentences aloud.

"The pleasure of Busby's company is what I most enjoy," he reluctantly reads. "He put a tack on Miss Yancy's chair, and she called him a horrible boy. At the end of the month, he was flinging two kittens across the width of the room ..."

Read more
Digital Trends’ Top Tech of CES 2023 Awards
Best of CES 2023 Awards Our Top Tech from the Show Feature

Let there be no doubt: CES isn’t just alive in 2023; it’s thriving. Take one glance at the taxi gridlock outside the Las Vegas Convention Center and it’s evident that two quiet COVID years didn’t kill the world’s desire for an overcrowded in-person tech extravaganza -- they just built up a ravenous demand.

From VR to AI, eVTOLs and QD-OLED, the acronyms were flying and fresh technologies populated every corner of the show floor, and even the parking lot. So naturally, we poked, prodded, and tried on everything we could. They weren’t all revolutionary. But they didn’t have to be. We’ve watched enough waves of “game-changing” technologies that never quite arrive to know that sometimes it’s the little tweaks that really count.

Read more
Digital Trends’ Tech For Change CES 2023 Awards
Digital Trends CES 2023 Tech For Change Award Winners Feature

CES is more than just a neon-drenched show-and-tell session for the world’s biggest tech manufacturers. More and more, it’s also a place where companies showcase innovations that could truly make the world a better place — and at CES 2023, this type of tech was on full display. We saw everything from accessibility-minded PS5 controllers to pedal-powered smart desks. But of all the amazing innovations on display this year, these three impressed us the most:

Samsung's Relumino Mode
Across the globe, roughly 300 million people suffer from moderate to severe vision loss, and generally speaking, most TVs don’t take that into account. So in an effort to make television more accessible and enjoyable for those millions of people suffering from impaired vision, Samsung is adding a new picture mode to many of its new TVs.
[CES 2023] Relumino Mode: Innovation for every need | Samsung
Relumino Mode, as it’s called, works by adding a bunch of different visual filters to the picture simultaneously. Outlines of people and objects on screen are highlighted, the contrast and brightness of the overall picture are cranked up, and extra sharpness is applied to everything. The resulting video would likely look strange to people with normal vision, but for folks with low vision, it should look clearer and closer to "normal" than it otherwise would.
Excitingly, since Relumino Mode is ultimately just a clever software trick, this technology could theoretically be pushed out via a software update and installed on millions of existing Samsung TVs -- not just new and recently purchased ones.

Read more