TY - JOUR
AB - newsfronts Monkeys master movement with their minds As reported at Neuroscience 2014, the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience (15–19 November 2014; Washington, DC), Miguel Nicolelis and colleagues at Duke University (Durham, NC) successfully trained two rhesus macaques to maneuver a wheelchair using a brain–machine interface that translated each monkey’s cortical activity into navigational signals that controlled the chair’s movement. Previous attempts to translate brain activity into mechanical control had limited success because they used noninvasive methods to record activity, which produced signals with limited bandwidth. Nicolelis’ group permanently implanted arrays of electrodes in several areas of each macaque’s cortex and linked them to a wireless recording system, which transmitted the cortical activity signals to a controller, where they were decoded into steering commands (direction, speed and turns) that operated a motorized wheelchair. Both macaques learned to steer their chairs within an open area to obtain grapes, a food reward. The macaques acquired the task quickly and carried it out efficiently, starting from various locations and in different orientations within the test area. The results may have application in the development of brain–machine interfaces to overcome paralysis and improve mobility in people with spinal cord injury or other 
TI - News updates
JF - Lab Animal
DO - 10.1038/laban.695
DA - 2015-01-20
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/springer-journals/news-updates-3qOcHYb4lk
SP - 44
EP - 45
VL - 44
IS - 2
DP - DeepDyve
ER -