By Zara Abrams – Keck School of Medicine of USC –
In a proof-of-concept study, a team of researchers from USC, Caltech and UC Irvine tested the full “bionic suit” with a patient for the first time, showing promising early results.
Restoring both walking and sensation to patients with paraplegia is an ambitious goal—but a team of researchers from the Keck School of Medicine of USC, the University of California, Irvine (UCI) and the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) is now one step closer.
With $8 million in funding from the highly competitive National Science Foundation CyberPhysical Systems program, the team is building a fully implantable brain-computer interface (BCI) that allows patients to use their thoughts to control wearable robotic legs, known as a robotic exoskeleton. The system is designed to help patients walk while also restoring the sensation of walking. In the first full test, the BCI was about 92% accurate at both reading step signals from the brain and delivering artificial walking sensation. The results were just published in the journal Brain Stimulation.
