The first sentence he thanked the doctor, then asked for a beer
First, let’s talk about the person with the “soul confinement” What is it? It’s such a horrible and lonely situation that the average person can hardly imagine. What would you do if you were completely paralyzed in every muscle group in your body, I mean 100 % muscles?
Not only can’t you get up, walk, or move, you can’t even open your mouth, move your lips, or even roll your eyes. Every movement of your body must be supported by someone else.
You need someone to open your eyelids every morning, and then close them for you every night. You need someone to open their mouth when feeding. And because your pharynx and esophagus muscles have also been paralyzed, you can’t swallow. People with locking paralysis can only eat liquid or pureed food, allowing it to flow into the stomach on its own.
Fortunately, they still have taste, even though the tongue cannot move. People with locked-in paralysis can still hear, see, smell, and taste. They have thoughts and feelings about the world. But because all muscle groups were paralyzed, they had no way to communicate or respond. They can’t speak, can’t signal, can’t even answer “Yes/No” questions.
Therefore, these patients are likened to souls who are “trapped” in their own bodies. Typically, patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) will progress to “soul-locked” paralysis in the late stages of the disease.
Most ALS patients do not live more than 5 years after receiving a diagnosis. And they will have to prepare mentally for the last years of extremely lonely life when “locked up“. But now, technology will help change that grim reality.
A mind-reading chip implanted directly into the brains of paralyzed people will allow them to communicate. The technology has just been successfully tested on the first patient, and the first complete sentence he uttered was: Thank you, doctors. He then asked the carer if he could get himself a beer.
The German man was “trapped” in his own body, but has now been freed.
Man whose soul is locked up
The story of the German man born in 1985 begins in August 2015, right in the middle of his beautiful 30s. The man had to receive a diagnosis of ALS, a disease that is killing motor neurons in the spine and gradually leaving him in a state of paralysis.
Within four months, the man lost the ability to walk and could no longer communicate verbally. By July 2016, even his diaphragm was paralyzed. No longer able to breathe on his own, doctors had to attach him to an artificial ventilator and feed him with a nasogastric tube.
Initially, the man was given MyTobii, an eye-tracking device, to communicate. It includes a camera that can guess what letter his eyes are looking at on the screen and type out what he wants to say.
But gradually, even the muscle that controls the patient’s eye pupil becomes paralyzed. Doctors realized that the man would sooner or later face a state of “soul lockup”, at which point he would be forever unable to react to the outside world.
At this point, they gave him an option, which was to participate in a brain chip experiment so that they could read his thoughts directly through a BCI (or brain-computer interface) port. .
The answer was now only “Yes/No”, and in a near-final move, the man chose “Yes”, agreeing to participate in the experiment.
This chip was implanted in the brain of a “locked-in” man to help him communicate.
Be free
The transplant was performed in March 2019 at a hospital in Munich. In it, doctors implanted two microelectrode chips measuring 1.5 mm into the motor cortex that controls the left muscles of the patient.
The chip is connected to the outside of the skull by a BCI port and then connected to a computer to pick up the brain’s nerve signals. The man was discharged from the hospital 3 days after surgery, to begin the process of practicing speaking and spelling using only his thoughts.
Doctors use software written in Python and C++ to control all of the patient’s BCI speech sessions. First, he was instructed to answer “Yes/No” questions by firing specific neural signals in the cerebral cortex.
Then, he was trained to spell each letter, put them together into words, and finally complete sentences. The training process lasted more than 100 days, on the 107th day, the man said the first sentence: “I want to thank the doctors”.
Over the next 400 days, his communication skills gradually improved. The man begins to talk to his mother, the sister who is always there to take care of him and especially his baby son.
“I love my son, he looks cool”he say. “Do you want to watch Disney’s Robin Hood with me?“, and then the two of them watched the episode together.
“I want to listen to music and a beer”
With the ability to communicate using the BCI, doctors say their patients are clearly out of confinement. And while they don’t know how long he will continue to live, these days have become a lot easier for him.
The man was able to ask his mother to give him a head massage, change his position and even change a new bed. Some days, he wants to wear a shirt, wants to put gel on his eyes to prevent dryness, and wants to eat specific foods, including curries and sweet bean soup.
One day, he asked his sister if he could get himself a beer? The doctors and his sister agreed. So for the first time since the paralysis, this man can feel the taste of beer again.
Doctors say this is the first time they have helped a paralyzed person “locked up”“Communication is possible through brain chip implants and BCI interfaces. They plan to continue to improve the system and test it in more patients, before scaling it up commercially.
It is expected that such a BCI system will cost about 500,000 USD, equivalent to 11.4 billion VND. But the doctors expect prices to drop in about two years, when they standardize their devices for mass production.
Refer to Sciencealert , Science , Nature
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at Blogtuan.info – Source: cafebiz.vn – Read the original article here
