Thanks to implants in his brain and spinal cord, a 40-year-old man whose legs were paralyzed in a bike accident 12 years ago can now walk.
After suffering spinal cord damage in his neck in a bike accident in 2011, Gert-Jan Oskam was left with paralyzed legs and partially paralyzed arms. The ‘digital bridge’ between Oskam’s brain and the nerves below his damage has allowed him to stand and walk once more.
According to Oskam, the artificial intelligence implant has changed his life.
“Last week, I needed to paint something, but no one was available to assist me. I did it myself while I was standing, so I took the walker and the paint,” he explains.
The brain-spine interface, developed by neuroscientist Grégoire Courtine and his colleagues at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, builds on earlier work2. They showed in 2018 that using technology that stimulates the lower spine with electrical pulses along with rigorous training, it is possible to assist people with spinal-cord injuries regain their ability to walk.
One of the study participants was Oskam, but after three years, his progress stalled. He received a novel device that links Oskam’s spinal implant with two disc-shaped implants placed in his skull, allowing two 64-electrode grids to rest against the membrane encasing the brain.
The electrical activity in the cortex, the brain’s outer layer, is picked up by the skull implants when Oskam considers walking. Oskam wears a computer in his backpack that wirelessly transmits and decodes this signal before sending the information to the spinal pulse generator.
According to Courtine, the earlier apparatus “was more of a pre-programmed stimulation” that produced robotic stepping movements. Now, it’s entirely different since Gert-Jan has complete control over the stimulation parameter, allowing him to stop, walk, and ascend stairs.
According to Oskam, “Stimulation used to rule me; now, I am controlling stimulation with thought. The simulation will begin running as soon as I make a decision to take a step.
Oskam regained his capacity to actively move his legs and feet after around 40 therapy sessions utilizing the brain-spine interface. This indicates that the training sessions with the new gadget stimulated further regeneration in nerve cells that were not fully damaged during his injury. That type of voluntary movement was not conceivable after spinal stimulation alone. If Oskam utilizes crutches, he can also travel short distances without the gadget.
It’s wonderful news for anyone with a spinal cord injury, according to Bruce Harland, a neurologist at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, “because even if it’s a longer-term chronic injury, there’s still a few different ways that healing could happen.”
According to neurologist Anna Leonard of the University of Adelaide in Australia, “it’s certainly a huge jump” toward better function for those with spinal-cord injuries. And, according to her, there is still room for additional procedures, like stem cells, to enhance results even more. She continues by saying that while walking has been restored by the brain-spine interface, other bodily functions like bladder and bowel control are unaffected. In order to advance gains in results for these other types of worlds, she argues, “there is undoubtedly still room for other areas of research.”
