Pacemaker could stop Parkinson’s tremors

A ‘‘pacemaker’’ for the brain is on the horizon to prevent people with Parkinson’s and epilepsy suffering from seizures and tremors. The device is made up of two tiny arrays of electrodes that sit inside the skull and link to a circuit board on the side of the head. It continually records the brain’s normal electrical activity and if it detects a change of rhythm immediately fires a stimulating charge to coax it back to normal. Similar deep brain stimulation is already used for people with Parkinson’s or epilepsy, but can take years to fine tune. ‘‘In the future we aim to incorporate learning into our platform to build intelligent devices that can figure out how to best treat you, and remove the doctor from having to constantly intervene,’’ said Dr Rikky Muller, an assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley.