For those people who have lost control of their legs, a new engineering marvel comes to help. Robotic high-tech exoskeletons reminding of Marvel's movie Iron Man will soon be a common occurrence in patients' homes and rehabilitation clinics. They can help getting patients who have lost mobility to stroke or spinal cord injury out of their wheelchairs. For all these people, the renewed locomotion could come with many physical benefits, from lower risk of infection to better blood circulation.
In order to make these exoskeletons to work, a brain - machine interface is needed. The emerging field of bioelectronics comes to help. Conceptually, the biggest challenge in designing a proper interface between human brain and machines is find a way to interpret the conversation between the nervous system and body's organs.
Achieving this task is the equivalent of learning how to speak the electrical language of the body. Another challenge is building small implants. Some of them are required to robust enough to run powerful microprocessors, while being as tiny as a cubic millimeter. Once scientists will succeed overcoming these challenges, what is now just an emerging field in bioelectronics will become soon widely adopted.
This can have applications that could help millions of people to walk again, with small computers hooked up to their nervous systems. And if a standalone computer can be implanted why not connecting to a network too? This prospect brings up the concern that the emerging industry will have to confront with the possibility of malignant hacking. In other words, bioelectronics can give someone a remote to control to another person's body.
Despite the uncertainties, there are studies in progress in the new area of bioelectronics, as well as applying the latest advances in robotics in building exoskeletons prosthetics. For example, the giant Pharma GlaxoSmithKline has invested in a project called SetPoint. The company's bioelectronics R. & D. unit also made partnerships with 26 independent research groups from six different countries.
They are trying to develop an implantable device that can exert influence over organs' functions by recording and responding to their electrical signals. This approach can help not only treat diseases by stimulating nerves with electricity but also using the signals collected from nerves in order to command attached exoskeletons on patients with mobility issues.
The Human Brain Project, a multinational think tank that put together 14 scientists, directed by the Fulbright scholar and neuroscientist Henry Markram, at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, is working on a project that will be made possible a computer simulation of the human brain. For centuries, the brain's circuitry, containing 100 billion neurons, seemed far too complex to understand. But now, the advances in science and technology made possible a better understanding of this body's C.P.U.
