March 24, 2011 | 4:15 PM |

BrainGate After 1,000 Days: Paralyzed Woman Controls Computer With Her Thoughts

FILED UNDER: Medicine/Science, BrainGate, research

BrainGate: One Thousand Days With a Brain Implant

The developers of BrainGate, an implanted brain computer, report a significant milestone: a paralyzed woman, who has had the implant for 1,000 days, was able to accurately control a computer cursor with her thoughts, according to a report published online today in the Journal of Neural Engineering

“This proof of concept — that after 1,000 days a woman who has no functional use of her limbs and is unable to speak can reliably control a cursor on a computer screen using only the intended movement of her hand — is an important step for the field,” said Dr. Leigh Hochberg, a Brown engineering associate professor, VA rehabilitation researcher, visiting associate professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School, and director of the BrainGate pilot clinical trial at MGH.

Read more about some of the patients involved in the BrainGate research here.

About the author

Blogger, CommonHealth Rachel Zimmerman worked as a staff reporter for The Wall Street Journal for 10 years, most recently covering health and medicine out of the paper’s Boston bureau. Rachel has also written for The New York Times, the (now-defunct) Seattle Post-Intelligencer and the alternative newspaper Willamette Week, in Portland, Ore., among other publications. Rachel co-wrote a book about birth, published by Bantam/Random House, and spent 2008 as a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT. Rachel lives in Cambridge with her husband and two daughters. View all posts by Rachel Zimmerman →