Brain Implants and Wearables Reroute Signals to Restore Movement and Sensation

In 2015, a group of neuroscientists and engineers assembled to watch a man play the video game Guitar Hero. He held the simplified guitar interface gingerly, using the fingers of his right hand to press down on the fret buttons and his left hand to hit the strum bar. What made this mundane bit of game play so extraordinary was the fact that the man had been paralyzed from the chest down for more than three years, without any use of his hands. Every time he moved his fingers to play a note, he was playing a song of restored autonomy. Bioelectronic medicine is a relatively new field, in which we use devices to read and modulate the electrical activity within the body's nervous system, pioneering new treatments for patients. My group's particular quest is to crack the neural codes related to movement and sensation so we can develop new ways to treat the millions of people around the world who are living with paralysis-5.4 million people in the United States alone. To do this we first need to understand how electrical signals from neurons in the brain relate to actions by the body; then we need to “speak” the language correctly and modulate the appropriate neural pathways to restore movement and the sense of touch. After working on this problem for more than 20 years, I feel that we've just begun to understand some key parts of this mysterious code