Gadgetory

six years ago in Burkhart broke his spine in a diving accident while vacationing with friends that accident left him paralyzed from the chest down but thanks to a neural implant he's been able to bypass his spinal cord injury and send signals from his brain down to his right arm that technology means that Ian cannot grasp objects and even move his fingers independently from each other which is the definite scientific burst in general when a person wants to move their finger their brain sends the signal through their spine to their hand but in Ian's case that signal gets blocked to bypass that problem the neural implant detects the signal that Ian's brain wants to send to the finger and relays them to a sleeve on his arm from there the sleeve will send the right electrical impulses through the muscles in his arm so he can complete the movement this happens in real-time which means that all inna has to do is think of a movement to actually make it happen and one really good example of that is ins ability to play video games like Guitar Hero the system took months to perfect but Ian can now swipe a credit card and play video games that demand a lot of dexterity with more practice he can increase his range of movement even further but there's only so much he can do with the current implant right now the size of the system fits on a tabletop which makes that impossible for him to use it outside the lab and then there's the problem of the implants precision it currently uses 96 electrodes to capture signals from man's brain that's not enough to translate precise movements like those that let us spread fingers on a keyboard for instance so the researchers plan to increase the number of electrodes to a couple thousand they'd also like to compress the computer so that if it's entirely inside the implant if they can do that then people might actually be able to use it on the go but that's still a long way off the researchers wouldn't tell me exactly how much the whole system costs but it's clear that even making small changes is going to be expensive and then there's the fact that the technology isn't quite there yet that doesn't mean that Ian is gonna be the first and last person to use the implant though the researchers have gotten approval to use it on four other people which means that we might hear some really great news about other cases like Ian's very soon I'm probably going to ad-lib the explanation where I'm gonna up is forgetting to talk about like this happens in real time I'm telling you because I'm hoping that I brain will remember that that's where I up I'm just gonna try it we'll see what