Tetraplegic man walks using mind-controlled exoskeleton
Robotic technology gave me new lease of life, says 28-yr-old Frenchman
Paris, Oct. 4: A tetraplegic man in France has been able to walk while wearing an exoskeleton controlled by his brain signals.
The 28-year-old man who is known only as Thibault, said taking his first steps in the suit felt like being the “first man on the Moon”.
The four-limbed robotic system controlled helped Mr Thibault to move his arms and walk using a ceiling-mounted harness for balance.
The whole-body exoskeleton, which is part of a two-year trial
by Clinatec and the University of Grenoble, is operated by recording and decoding brain signals. Mr Thibault was an optician before he fell 15m in an incident at a night club in 2015.
As part of the trial, he had surgery to place two implants on the surface of the brain, covering the parts that control movement.
Sixty-four electrodes on each implant read his brain activity and beam the instructions to a computer.
Software then reads the brainwaves and turns them into instructions to control the exoskeleton.
Paris: A French man paralysed in a night club accident can walk again thanks to a brain-controlled exoskeleton in what scientists said on Wednesday was a breakthrough providing hope to tetraplegics seeking to regain movement.
The patient trained for months, harnessing his brain signals to control a computer-simulated avatar to perform basic movements before using the robot device to walk.
Doctors who conducted the trial cautioned that the device is years away from being publicly available but stressed that it had “the potential to improve patients’ quality of life and autonomy”.
The man involved, identified only as Thibault, a 28-year-old from Lyon, said the technology had given him a new lease of life.
Four years ago that life changed forever when he fell 12 metres (40 feet) from
a balcony while on a night out, severing his spinal cord and leaving him paralysed from the shoulders down.
“When you’re in my position, when you can’t do anything with your body. I wanted to do something with my brain,” Thibault told AFP.
Training on a videogame avatar system for months to acquire the skills needed to operate
the exoskeleton, he said he had to “relearn” natural movements from scratch.
“I can’t go home tomorrow in my exoskeleton, but I’ve got to a point where I can walk. I walk when I want and I stop when I want.”
Cervical spinal cord injury leaves around 20 per cent of patients paralysed in all four limbs and is the most severe injury of its kind.
“The brain is still capable of generating commands that would normally move the arms and legs, there’s just nothing to carry them out,” said Alim-Louis Benabid, professor emeritus at Grenoble and lead author of the study published in The Lancet Neurology.
A team of experts from the Hospital of Grenoble Alpes, biomedical firm Cinatech and the CEA research centre started by implanting two recording devices either side of Thibault’s head, between the brain and the skin.
These read his sensorimotor cortex — the area that controls motor function.
Each decoder transmits the brain signals, which are then translated by an algorithm into the movements the patient has thought about. It is this system that sends physical commands that the exoskeleton executes.
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