First at-home brain implant lets “locked in” woman talk, venture outdoors

(credit: UC Berkeley)

A paralysed woman, who is "almost completely locked in," has become the first person to use a fully implanted brain-computer interface at home in day-to-day life without constant doctor supervision.

The work was presented at the annual Society for Neuroscience meeting by Nick Ramsey, a specialist in brain-computer interfaces (BCI) at the the Brain Center Rudolf Magnus at UMC Utrecht in the Netherlands. The research paper is published this month in the New England Journal of Medicine.

The patient, who is 58 years old and wishes to remain anonymous, was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) in 2008. ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig's disease or motor neurone disease, destroys the neurons that are required for voluntary muscle control. There's no known cure. Within a couple of years, ALS usually causes complete paralysis. In this case the patient still has control of her eyes, but that's about it.