Two sensors in the Posterior Parietal Cortex, which monitor electronic signals, allowed Erik Sorto control the robot arm as he would a real limb. He was able to pick up a drink and bring it to his lips. [i]Science[/i] details how the chip and the robot arm work in tandem.
Sorto was shot aged just 21, causing irreparable damage to his spinal cord and paralyzing him from the neck down. The arm has allowed the 34-year-old to regain some independence, taking his first unaided drink in over 10 years:
“I joke around with the guys that I want to be able to drink my own beer, to be able to take a drink at my own pace, when I want to take a sip out of my beer and to not have to ask somebody to give it to me,” Sorto said.
“I really miss that independence. I think that if it were safe enough, I would really enjoy grooming myself – shaving, brushing my own teeth. That would be fantastic.”
Researchers from Caltech, California were able to make Sorto’s dream a reality, one of whom was Professor Richard Andersen, who explained how they were able to get the arm to work:
“When you move your arm, you really don’t think about which muscles to activate and the details of the movement,” the Caltech professor of Neuroscience at said.
“So in this trial, we were successfully able to decode these actual intents, by asking the subject to simply imagine the movement as a whole, rather than breaking it down into a myriad components.”
The heartwarming footage of the technological breakthrough can be seen below: