The researchers of the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine have developed a brain-computer interface to return the touch to people with tetraplegia.
Return to “caress” a cat, or to perceive the consistency of an apple, or a deck of keys to the touch. A sensation so far unthinkable, for those suffering from Tetraplegia, but which now could become reality. Are in fact these The extraordinary results obtained by a project carried out by the researchers of the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine who have developed a brain-computer interface (BCI-Brain-Computer Interface) capable of “returning” the sense of touch to people with tetraplegia. Published in the magazine Nature Communicationsthe study is the result of the collaboration between the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Chicago. The brain-computer interface It is a system that manages to translate the activity of the brain into signals capable of improving or replacing the functions usually controlled by the brain, such as muscle movements: however, it can also be used to “adjust” the signals of interrupted sense and therefore return the lost perceptions to the patient, going to stimulate the brain directly. The research has been marked as a kind of game of the “hot/cold” typein a dark room full of infinite tactile possibilities. The participants, all patients who had reported a medullary lesion, was asked to “identify a combination of stimulation parameters that reproduce the feeling of caressing a cat or touching an apple, a key, a towel or a slice of toasted bread – all through Objects presented in digital form. All and three participants described the sensations in vivid and coherent terms, but also subjective and unique: for one, the cat was “warm and ticking”; For another, “smooth and silky”.
“The touch is a fundamental component of non -verbal social communication; It is a personal feeling, full of meaning»Explained the first author of the study, the Dr. Ceci Verbarscot, associate professor of neurosurgery and biomedical engineering at the University of Texas-Southwestern, and a former post-dictate purse at the Rehab neural engineering labs of the University of Pittsburgh. «Allowing users of the BCI to design their sensations helps them to make the interaction with objects more realistic and significant, bringing us more and more closer to the creation of an intuitive and pleasant neuroprothesis to use». The participants, during the experiments in which they explored digital objects through the qppunto an artificially recreated touch described The fur of a cat that makes the meltsthe rigid surface of a bouquet of keys and the rhotodnity of the apple. Already previously the researchers had tried, with different experiments, to “return” the touch to patients, but without too much success: the sensations transmitted by this sort of artificial touch were in fact often described only as vague sensations of tinglingwhich proved to be the same for any digital object was used. On the other hand, giving patients themselves the opportunity to check the parameters of electrical stimulation directly in the first person – thus having to set them in advance, in a predefined way – has allowed us to recreate personalized sensations. “We set up this study with the ambition to get to the moon, and we have at least entered orbit»Said the senior author of the study, the Dr. Robert Gaunt, associate professor of physical and rehabilitation medicine at the University of Pittsburgh. “Participants were asked to carry out a really difficult task: to distinguish between different objects only through the tactile sensation. And despite the difficulty, they succeeded in it». Research is a very important step forward towards the accurate creation of tactile perception on a paralyzed hand, and therefore the development of an artificial limb that it can be able to integrate naturally into the sensory universe of each patient.
