Research
Research in sensory substitution has made progress in recent years. Especially in vision, due to the knowledge of the working of the visual system, eye implants (often involving some brain implants or monitoring) have been applied with demonstrated success. For hearing, cochlear implants are used to stimulate the auditory nerve directly. The vestibulocochlear nerve is part of the peripheral nervous system, but the interface is similar to that of true brain implants.
Multiple projects have demonstrated success at recording from the brains of animals for long periods of time. As early as 1976, researchers at the NIH led by Edward Schmidt made action potential recordings of signals from Rhesus monkey motor cortexes using immovable "hatpin" electrodes, including recording from single neurons for over 30 days, and consistent recordings for greater than three years from the best electrodes.
The "hatpin" electrodes were made of pure iridium and insulated with Parylene-c, materials that are currently used in the Cyberkinetics implementation of the Utah array. These same electrodes, or derivations thereof using the same biocompatible electrode materials, are currently used in visual prosthetics laboratories, laboratories studying the neural basis of learning, and motor prosthetics approaches other than the Cyberkinetics probes.
A competing series of electrodes and projects is sold by Plexon including Plextrode Series of Electrodes. These are variously the "Michigan Probes", the microwire arrays first used at MIT, and the FMAs from MicroProbe that emerged from the visual prosthetic project collaboration between Phil Troyk, David Bradley, and Martin Bak.
Other laboratory groups produce their own implants to provide unique capabilities not available from the commercial products.
Breakthroughs include studies of the process of functional brain re-wiring throughout the learning of a sensory discrimination, control of physical devices by rat brains, monkeys over robotic arms, remote control of mechanical devices by monkeys and humans, remote control over the movements of roaches, electronic-based neuron transistors for leeches, the first reported use of the Utah Array in a human for bidirectional signalling. Currently a number of groups are conducting preliminary motor prosthetic implants in humans. These studies are presently limited to several months by the longevity of the implants.
Read more about this topic: Brain Implant
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