(April 8, 2015) The
ceremonial opening kick of the 2014 FIFA World Cup in Sao Paolo, Brazil, which
was performed—with the help of a brain-controlled exo-skeleton—by a local teen
who had been paralyzed from the waste down due to a spinal cord injury, was a
seminal moment for the area of neuroscience that strives to connect the brain
with functional prosthetics. The public display was a representative of
thousands of such neuroprosthetic advances in recent years, and the tens of years
of brain research and technological development that have gone into them. And
while this display was quite an achievement in its own right, a Drexel
University biomedical engineer working at the leading edge of the field
contends that these devices are also opening a new portal for researchers to
understand how the brain functions.