Without using any bodily motion, four volunteers with epilepsy were able to play a simple videogame using only brainpower in a health and science experiment. A grid of electrodes was placed on the patients’ brains, and after about a half hour of training and practice, they were able to move an object on a screen up or down toward a target by thinking the word “move” or by imaging movement.
The research aims to innovate how paraplegics and other physically disabled people interact with the world, possibly one day helping to create machines that can be operated via non-invasive electrodes.
"After a brief training session, the patients could play the game by using signals that come off the surface of the brain. They achieved between 74 and 100 percent accuracy, with one patient hitting 33 out of 33 targets correctly in a row,” said researcher Daniel Moran, Ph.D., assistant professor of biomedical engineering.
