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Paralyzed woman controls artificial arm with thought
Last reviewed: 01.07.2025
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52-year-old American Jan Schuermann, whose entire body is paralyzed, has learned to control a mechanical arm using her mind. The complex mechanical device is controlled using impulses that come from the human brain.
Thirteen years ago, Jan lost her ability to move due to a spinal cord injury, which damaged her nervous system and led to the consequences that a patient experiences with a broken cervical vertebrae.
Scientists from the University of Pittsburgh did something incredible - they implanted electrodes into the brain, with the help of which a woman was able to control an artificial hand.
The computer program developed by specialists can record impulses coming from the cerebral cortex and thus a person is able to control an artificial hand.
The woman underwent surgery to implant a network of electrodes into her brain, positioned on each side next to the neurons responsible for controlling her limbs. The electrodes were then connected to a robotic arm and a computer program.
Experts are calling the achievement a major advance in prosthetics, where a person can learn to control their limbs with just their thoughts.
It took the patient two days to learn to move her hand in different directions, and after a week she was able to pick up objects of different shapes. Jan focused not on how to move her hand, but on a specific goal, for example, to pick up the desired object from the table.
Andrew Schwartz, a professor of neuroscience at the University of Pittsburgh, says all the scientists involved in the program were amazed at how quickly Jan was able to master the complex mechanism.
At the beginning of the experiment, the robotic arm was programmed to assist the patient's movements and eliminate possible small errors. But after a short time, Jan began to cope with the artificial arm herself, without the help of the program.
After three months, the paralyzed woman was already able to perform 91% of tasks with the mechanical limb and had learned to do it thirty seconds faster.
These are phenomenal results that are a real breakthrough in biomedicine. Thanks to the scientists' development, paralyzed people will be able to control mechanical limbs using natural brain activity, which will allow them to perform simple manipulations and actions that are elementary for a healthy person, but inaccessible to a paralyzed person.
Scientists are going to improve the development. Despite its uniqueness and the success of the experiment, there are a number of shortcomings and problems. In particular, scars interfere with the transfer of data to the computer. They are formed in the area of the implantation of sensors. At the moment, specialists are considering the possibility of wireless methods of transmitting impulses, but it is too early to talk about this.
At the moment, the mechanical hand is not capable of more complex actions, such as writing something or tying shoelaces, but progress does not stand still, so it is quite possible that scientists will improve the capabilities of the artificial limb.
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