The greatest desire for most people with high-level spinal cord injury is for some amount of restored hand movement. A number of years ago, my lab developed an intracortical brain-computer interface (iBCI) that used recordings of single neurons in the motor cortex to make predictions of muscle activity. These, in turn, we used to control electrical stimulation of the temporarily paralyzed muscles of a monkey’s hand. This “Functional Electrical Stimulation” (FES) iBCI allowed the monkeys to voluntarily control not only the movement of their fingers, but also to grasp, and exert graded force on objects. This “biomimetic” iBCI, allowed more nearly natural control of hand movement than is possible with other existing iBCIs. Beyond the ability to restore voluntary limb movement, there is evidence that tight synchrony between attempted movement and peripheral neuromuscular stimulation may invoke neural plasticity that could accelerate recovery from spinal cord injury. In this talk, I will describe the basic work that led to our proof-of-concept in monkeys and our further development of the FES iBCI that would be applicable to a broader range of the activities of daily living. Finally, I will describe our most recent efforts to translate this technology to humans with spinal cord injury.
