(October 17, 2011) Seven years after a motorcycle accident
damaged his spinal cord and left him paralyzed, 30-year-old Tim Hemmes reached
up to touch hands with his girlfriend in a painstaking and tender high-five
Hemmes, of Evans City, Pa., is
the first to participate in a new trial assessing whether the thoughts of a
person with spinal-cord injury can be used to control the movement of an
external device, such as a computer cursor or a sophisticated prosthetic arm.
The project, one of two brain-computer interface (BCI) studies under way at the
University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and UPMC Rehabilitation Institute,
used a grid of electrodes placed on the surface of the brain to control the
arm.
It was a unique robotic arm and
hand, designed by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, that
Hemmes willed to extend first toward the palm of a researcher on the team and,
a few minutes later, to his girlfriend’s hand.