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Comment by vegetablepotpie | Hacker News Reader

I worked in a lab over the summer to develop non-invasive methods to give quadriplegics control over a robotic arm. Although implants have a ways to go, this development is encouraging. I'm excited to see where this technology will go, hopefully it will lead to giving quadriplegics more autonomy in their lives.

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How are implants doing with regard to long life? Scar tissue seems to be a problem.

New electrodes are much thinner, and some are designed to prevent this.

That’s interesting because the implants I’m aware of usually operate little more than 2 years.

Have you guys published a paper yet? I am fascinated by the subject and am really curious how you did it.

I’m working on a case study of the project that I’m going to submit to a journal with my professor.

Basically our approach is to use eeg, eye movements and head movements to let patients control an arm with the goal of making them more independent.

Are you familiar with Neuralink? They showed a video with like 1000 connections.. vastly more than this example.

They have 64 connections but use only 32 due to limited computational power.

Yes, it’s really interesting and my futurist friend theorizes about the possibilities when we hike. The neuroscientists I work with are skeptical of Neuralink because there isn’t a precedent to do invasive surgeries on healthy patients. I hope the company is successful, their work will teach us a lot about the brain. We’re trying less invasive, non surgical methods, to control appendages that we anticipate will be cheaper and lower risk.

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