Elderly And Disabled Assistive Technology Market To Surpass $26 Billion By 2024

Elderly And Disabled Assistive Technology Market To Surpass $26 Billion By 2024

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The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that 285 million people are visually impaired worldwide. 70 million people need a wheelchair. Another 360 million people globally have moderate to profound hearing loss. Globally, more than 1 billion people need one or more assistive products.

The global elderly and disabled assistive devices market was valued at $14 billion in 2015 and is expected to surpass $26 billion by 2024, according to Coherent Market Insights. It is a sizable market with an incredibly diverse set of needs. Many products have to be customized which is why 3D printing is an ideal way to study and solve some of it.

Photo from MatterHackers Envision the Future Design Challeng

MatterHackers, one of the largest 3D printing retailers in the U.S., wants to put a big dent in those numbers by encouraging inspiring, low-cost or free, assistive device models that people can 3D print or build from some other material. Officially, the “Envision The Future Design Challenge” is to create educational tactile models and assistive devices for the blind and visually impaired.

WHO defines assistive technology as any product that helps maintain or improve an individual function. Hearing aids, wheelchairs, eyeglasses, prostheses, pill organizers, and memory aids are all examples of assistive devices or products. You do not have to go far in 3D printing circles to find solutions or at least potential ideas to solve these sorts of problems or issues -- and I have written about many of them -- from custom insoles (orthotics) to hearing aids to haptic feedback in a glove (one of my very first posts over 5 years ago).

With an aging global population and a rise in noncommunicable diseases, more than 2 billion people will need at least 1 assistive product by 2050, with many older people needing 2 or more, according to a WHO assistive device fact sheet.

With an aging global population and a rise in noncommunicable diseases, more than 2 billion people will need at least 1 assistive product by 2050, with many older people needing 2 or more, according to a WHO assistive device fact sheet.

One of the more famous assistive device designs, not part of the MatterHackers design challenge, comes from the e-NABLE Community: the “Iron Man” video tells the story of Robert Downey Jr. giving an Ironman prosthetic hand to a child. Awesome video. That design was developed by the UCF Armory (University of Central Florida), led by Albert Manero, the Limbitless Arm was e-NABLE’s first myoelectric design. The Limbitless Arm is licensed under the Creative Commons-Attribution-Non-Commercial license. Success stories like these inspire more people to realize how accessible 3D technology is making incremental and exponential improvements possible -- that you might have an idea that could change the world for you or someone else.

Given that so many people have a need for assistive devices and products across a wide range; 3D printing is one of the best ways to approach the problems. If you look at an organization like Enabling The Future, that crowdsources the making of 3D printable prosthetic hands, a design challenge can provide new ideas and solutions that might not otherwise make it to market. Plus, it spreads the word and inspires more people, design-minded people, to consider how they might approach this massive market need and opportunity.

Additional resources:

Briefly, because everyone wants to know about prizes when there's a challenge like the Envision The Future Design Challenge, there are two categories: Youth (under 18) and Adults (18 and over). Each category will have 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place winners with prizes sponsored by LulzBot and MatterHackers. Youth grand prize is a Lulzbot Mini 3D Printer (don’t let the name fool you; it is a decent size printer). Adult grand prize is a Lulzbot TAZ 6 (larger print area than the Mini). Both grand prize categories also come with a MatterControl Touch T10 - 10.6" Standalone 3D Printer Controller – basically a tablet you can use to run a printer without needing a full computer. The challenge runs from March 20, 2017 through May 8, 2017 and the full details are here.

WHO fact sheet on Assistive Technology

Coherent Market Insights produced the Elderly and Disabled Assistive Devices - Evolving from Luxury to Necessity report; a summary is available here.

'Voice banks' step in to keep chronically ill patients from falling silent

'Voice banks' step in to keep chronically ill patients from falling silent

aac als amyotrophic lateral sclerosis assistive tech Assistive Technology augmentative communication augmentative/alternative communication mnd motor neuron disease voice banking

For thousands of Minnesotans with neurodegenerative diseases, losing one's ability to speak is one of the most devastating consequences.

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Every so often, Robert White breaks into song and serenades his 13-year-old son Kieran with a tender Irish lullaby, “That Little Boy of Mine,” taught to him by his father.

But the deep-throated voice that used to fill his family’s living room in West St. Paul now quivers and shakes. There are times when White, who has amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, a terminal disease that impairs his motor skills, can barely finish the chorus before his voice dips to a hoarsened whisper.

For White, and thousands of other Minnesotans afflicted with neurodegenerative diseases, losing one’s ability to speak is one of the most devastating consequences.

Now, however, researchers have found a way to preserve the unique essence of a human voice — in all its idiosyncratic nuance and power — for people with incurable and often debilitating illnesses.

Using new voice database technology, University of Minnesota speech pathologists can record people saying hundreds of sentences and phrases, break them down into phonetic units, and then reconstruct a personalized voice that can be used on a speech-generating device. The end result of this process, known as “voice banking,” is a voice that is nearly identical to the person’s original, healthy voice.

While the technology is still new, many people feel they are in a race against time to store their original voices before they become unrecognizable to their families and friends. Even the simple act of saying “I love you” can be too much of a strain for people in the later stages of ALS or other neurodegenerative illnesses.

Logan Eickhoff, background, was tearful as she watched her mother, Wendy, record sentences that will form a voice repository for when ALS takes Wendy’s speech away.

“This is about preserving a person’s essential dignity, rather than having to depend on a canned synthetic voice that many find dehumanizing,” said Dr. H. Timothy Bunnell, director of the speech-language laboratory in Wilmington, Del., that pioneered the voice-banking technology about a decade ago.

But the process of preserving a voice is an emotional one for families. It comes with the recognition that a loved one is dying, and that even a carefully reconstructed voice — built over a period of weeks or months — will never be an exact match to a person’s original speech. Even the most sophisticated audio technology cannot recapture the spontaneous emotion of someone who bursts into laughter, or the gentle timbre of a parent’s voice as they sing to a child, researchers say.

‘It’s bittersweet’

On a recent morning, Wendy Eickhoff, 49, struggled to contain her emotions as she began the arduous process of recording more than 1,600 preselected sentences at a speech laboratory tucked in a brick building on the University of Minnesota’s East Bank campus.

Last October, Eickhoff was diagnosed with a rare form of ALS known as bulbar onset, which first attacks the muscles that move the tongue, mouth and vocal cords. It was a particularly brutal diagnosis for Eickhoff, a self-described “talker” who works as a technology relationship manager at Wells Fargo. Slurred speech and weakened tongue muscles were among her first symptoms.

“It was devastating because I have always relished talking,” she said.

As Eickhoff rattled off sentences in a soundproof room, including lines from the “The Velveteen Rabbit” and “The Wizard of Oz,” her daughter Logan, 21, watched intensely through a window in an adjoining room. With a tinge of sadness, Logan expressed hope that voice banking would preserve the unique character of her mother’s speech, from her high-pitched laugh to the gentle way she called out “Good morning sunshine!” to her daughter each morning.

At one point, Logan broke down in tears after a speech pathologist calmly informed her that her mother’s recorded voice would survive her death and would always be available to the family.

“It’s difficult, really difficult,” said Logan, who is pursuing a degree in linguistics. “I don’t want to have to acknowledge that in the potentially near future that my mom won’t be able to speak. But I also feel lucky, because this means that even after she’s gone, I’ll be able to hear her voice. It’s bittersweet.”

Those who have been through the process speak of it in glowing terms.

When Robert White finished recording the last of 1,610 sentences last month, after five grueling sessions, he threw up his hands in victory and handed out assorted chocolates to the speech-language pathologists and young students who helped him through the process.

“There is a real sense of accomplishment when you get to the end,” said his wife, Argerie White. “I mean, how wonderful would it be, if Bob ever loses his voice, that we can still hear him sing?”

Sophisticated technology

Until recently, people like the Whites and the Eickhoffs relied on interactive whiteboards or robotic synthesizers, similar to that used by renowned physicist Stephen Hawking, to communicate with the world after illnesses had taken their speech. But voice-banking technology has become so sophisticated that it can now cull through thousands of phonetic syllables and sort them in a way that replicates the pattern of a person’s speech. The recording process emphasizes the repetition of vowels, because the medley of “ohs” and “ahs” are largely what make a person’s voice distinctive, researchers say.

While the technology is still being tested and enhanced, that has not dissuaded the regional chapter of the ALS Association from encouraging people with the disease to take advantage of the technology while their voices are still strong. The voice-banking service is now available at university speech clinics throughout the Upper Midwest, from Fargo to Duluth. The cost of creating a voice can run from a few hundred dollars to more than $1,000, depending on the provider. In Minnesota and the Dakotas, the cost for those with ALS is covered by the regional ALS Association.

“It’s crazy-amazing how well this works,” said Rebecca Lulai, a clinical supervisor and speech-language pathologist at the University of Minnesota.

Pete Klinkhammer, who remembers the exact minute he was diagnosed with ALS (11:47 a.m. on June 14, 2013), was among the first to test voice-banking in Minnesota and is now an outspoken proponent. Klinkhammer, 54, a gregarious former social worker from Albertville and bulky ex-college football player, has a bellowing laugh and a penchant for off-color jokes and puns. The technology enables him to keep speaking through an iPad, often late in the evening, when his throat muscles cramp and his voice starts to slur.

During a recent visit with his 28-year-old daughter Chelsea, Klinkhammer pulled out his iPad and began tapping out a few of his favorite puns as his daughter watched with amusement.

“A guy just threw milk at me. How dairy!” he wrote, throwing his head back in laughter. The words “I love you, Chelsea,” came out of a small speaker attached to his iPad with virtually the same inflection as his regular voice.

“That is definitely your voice, Dad,” gushed Chelsea, hugging him.

“This illness can come to define you because it takes away so many outward physical aspects of your being,” Klinkhammer said. “But voice banking epitomizes the idea that this illness can’t take everything away, because it can’t take away your voice.”

 Via http://www.startribune.com/new-technology-helps-minnesotans-with-neurological-disorders-preserve-their-voices/415954614/

Our Voices are Stronger Together -- ALS Advocacy Conference in DC!

Our Voices are Stronger Together -- ALS Advocacy Conference in DC!

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ALS National Advocacy Conference Registration Now Open

by The ALS AssociationMarch 1, 2017Leave a comment

There is a need to continue to educate Members of Congress about ALS and its true impact on people living with ALS and their loved ones. This is where you and your voice come in. Advocates – people living with ALS, their families, friends, doctors and researchers – successfully sharing their stories with members of Congress will result in more legislative victories. Your personal story, delivered first hand, is one of the most powerful tools we have.

That is why The ALS Association invites you to join the entire ALS community as we unite in Washington, D.C. for the 2017 National ALS Advocacy Conference. This is our opportunity to share your ALS story and let Members of Congress know the true nature of the disease and why more must be done now.

The public policy priorities that The Association and the ALS community will be focused on this year include asking Member of Congress to 1) cosponsor the ALS Disability Insurance Access Act (S.379/HR.1171), 2) cosponsor legislation, soon to be introduced, to protect access to complex rehabilitation technology, and 3) appropriate $10 million each for both the National ALS Registry at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the ALS Research Program at the Department of Defense (DOD). For more information about the ALS Disability Insurance Access Act (S.379/HR.1171) click here.

This year’s conference will be held Sunday, May 14th – Tuesday, May 16th at the J.W. Marriott, in Washington, D.C. After a day and a half of meetings and training sessions, ALS Advocates from across the country will take to Capitol Hill for meetings with their legislators on Tuesday.

To attend the 2017 National ALS Advocacy Conference, please register online at www.ALSA.org/advocacy/advocacy-day. This website also provides information such as the hotel – the J.W. Marriott, travel information, a conference outline and other important information for participants.

Conference registration fees are waived for people with ALS and for one caregiver traveling with them to the conference.

For other participants, the 2017 conference has a $175 non-refundable registration fee for attendees who are affiliated with The ALS Association, an ALS Association Chapter or other affiliated organization. This fee covers a small portion of conference costs, including meals, transportation to Capitol Hill and briefing materials. Registration fees for children are $25. The fee for non-affiliate attendees is $350.

For the J.W. Marriott hotel, the single/double occupancy rate is $299 plus tax per night; $319 + tax for triple occupancy; $339 + tax for quadruple occupancy; with a maximum of four guests per room. Once you register for the conference, you will be provided with a direct link to the J.W. Marriott’s reservations website.

In order to request an ADA accessible hotel room, you must contact Michael Coscia at adaroom@alsa-national.org. Your e-mail should include your hotel confirmation number. For all additional questions about hotel reservations or transportation, please contact Michael Coscia.

General questions about the 2017 ALS National Advocacy Conference can be sent to advocacy@alsa-national.org.

The voices on the Hill during the Fly In were heard well, but were just a start. Let us join forces to make our voices louder by participating in the 2017 National ALS Advocacy Conference. We look forward to seeing you there and working together to champion these important priorities for the ALS community!

Brain–Computer Interface Allows Speediest Typing to Date

Brain–Computer Interface Allows Speediest Typing to Date

als assistive tech Assistive Technology augmentative communication brain computer interface Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) computer access mnd speech generating device

Via Scientific American -- https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/brain-computer-interface-allows-speediest-typing-to-date/

A new interface system allowed three paralyzed individuals to type words up to four times faster than the speed that had been demonstrated in earlier studies

• By Simon Makin on February 21, 2017 

A participant enrolled by Stanford University in the BrainGate clinical trial uses the brain-computer interface to type by controlling a computer cursor with her thoughts. Credit: Courtesy Stanford University

Ten years ago Dennis Degray’s life changed forever when he slipped and fell while taking out the trash in the rain. He landed on his chin, causing a severe spinal cord injury that left him paralyzed below the neck. Now he’s the star participant in an investigative trial of a system that aims to help people with paralysis type words using only their thoughts.

The promise of brain–computer interfaces (BCIs) for restoring function to people with disabilities has driven researchers for decades, yet few devices are ready for widespread practical use. Several obstacles exist, depending on the application. For typing, however, one important barrier has been reaching speeds sufficient to justify adopting the technology, which usually involves surgery. A study published Tuesday in eLife reports the results of a system that enabled three participants—Degray and two people with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS, or Lou Gehrig's disease, a neurodegenerative disease that causes progressive paralysis)—to type at the fastest speeds yet achieved using a BCI—speeds that bring the technology within reach of being practically useful. “We're approaching half of what, for example, I could probably type on a cell phone,” says neurosurgeon and co-senior author, Jaimie Henderson of Stanford University.

The researchers measured performance using three tasks. To demonstrate performance in the most natural scenario possible, one participant was assessed in a “free typing” task, where she just answered questions using the device. But typing speeds are conventionally measured using copy typing, which involves typing out set phrases, so all three participants were also assessed this way. The woman who performed the free-typing task achieved faster than six words-per-minute, the other ALS patient managed nearly three and Degray achieved almost eight. The group reported comparable results in a Nature Medicine studyin 2015 but these were achieved using software that exploited the statistics of English to predict subsequent letters. No such software was employed in this study.

The drawback of copy typing is performance can vary with the specific phrases and keyboard layouts used. To get a measure independent of any of these factors, the third task involved selecting squares on a six by six grid as they lit up randomly. This gets closer to quantifying the maximum speed the system can output information, and is easily converted into a digital “bits per second” measure. The team used this range of tasks, without predictive software, because one of the study’s central aims was to develop standardized measures. “We need to establish measures so that—in spite of potential variability between people, methods and researchers—we can really say, ‘clearly this new advance led to higher performance,’ because we have systematic ways of comparing that,” says co-lead author Chethan Pandarinath, then a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford. “It's critical for moving this technology forward.”

The two ALS patients achieved 2.2 and 1.4 bits per second, respectively, more than doubling previous records (held by these same participants in a previous study from this group). Degray achieved 3.7 bits per second, which is four times faster than the previous best speed. “This is a pretty large leap in performance in comparison to previous clinical studies of BCIs,” Pandarinath says.

Other researchers agree these are state-of-the-art results. “This is the fastest typing anyone has shown with a BCI,” says biomedical engineer Jennifer Collinger, of the University of Pittsburgh, who was not involved in the study. “It's on par with technologies like eye-trackers, but there are groups those technologies don’t work for such as people who are “locked-in.” These speeds also approach what ALS patients questioned in a survey said they would want from a BCI device. “You're getting to the point where performance is good enough that users would actually want to have it,” Collinger says.

Participants had either one or two tiny (one-sixth-inch) electrode arrays implanted on the surfaces of their brains. These “intracortical” implants contain 96 microelectrodes that penetrate one to 1.5 millimeters into parts of the motor cortex that control arm movements. Two of the surgeries were performed by Henderson, who co-directs Stanford’s Neural Prosthetics Translational Laboratory with the study’s senior co-author, bioengineer Krishna Shenoy. The neural signals recorded by the electrodes are transmitted via a cable to a computer where algorithms developed in Shenoy's lab decode the participant's intentions and translate the signals into movements of a computer cursor. The Stanford team is part of a multi-institute consortium called BrainGate, which includes Massachusetts General Hospital and Brown University, among others.

Other methods of interfacing with the brain via electrodes include those put on the scalp for electroencephalography (EEG) and ones placed under the skull on the brain’s surface, known as electrocorticography (ECoG). The advantage of intracortical implants is they can pick out activity from single cells whereas the other methods capture the average activity of thousands of neurons. “This performance is 10 times better than anything you would get from EEG or ECoG, [which don’t] contain enough information to do this kind of task at this level,” says neurobiologist Andrew Schwartz, at Pitt, who was not involved in the study. Movement and scarring reduces signal quality over roughly the first two years after implantation, but what remains is still useful—“much better than you get with any other technique,” he says.

The biggest drawback, currently, is having wires coming out of people's heads and attached to cables, which is cumbersome and carries risks. “The future is making these devices wireless,” Pandarinath says. “We're not there yet with people but we’re probably closer to five than 10 years away, and that’s a critical step [toward] a device that you could send somebody home with and be less worried about potential risks like infection.” The devices would need wireless power but several groups are already working on this. “Most of the technology is basically there,” Schwartz says. “You can do that inductively using coils—like wirelessly charging your cell phone in a cradle with coils on either side.”

The team attributes the improvements to better systems engineering and decoding algorithms. “Performing repeated computations rapidly is critical in a real-time control system,” Pandarinath says. The researchers published a study last year, led by Stanford bioengineer Paul Nuyujukian. In it they trained two macaque monkeys to perform a similar task to the grid exercise used in this study. The animals typed sentences by selecting characters on a screen as they changed color (although they wouldn’t have understood what the words meant). When the team added a separate algorithm to detect the monkeys’ intention to stop, their best speed increased by two words per minute.

This “discrete click decoder” was also used in the current study. “We've basically created a ‘point and click’ interface here, like a mouse. That’s a good interface for things like modern smartphones or tablets,” Pandarinath says, “which would open a whole new realm of function beyond communication: surfing the Web, playing music, all sorts of things able-bodied people take for granted.”

The Stanford team is already investigating wireless technology, and has ambitious long-term goals for the project. “The vision we hope to achieve someday would be to be able to plug a wireless receiver into any computer and use it using your brain,” Henderson says. “One of our main goals is to allow 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year control of a standard computer interface using only brain signals.”

Microsoft app helps people with ALS speak using just their eyes

Microsoft app helps people with ALS speak using just their eyes

aac als assistive tech Assistive Technology augmentative communication Eye Gaze eyegaze microsoft microsoft accessibility mnd

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2121579-microsoft-app-helps-people-with-als-speak-using-just-their-eyes/

The eyes say it all

GazeSpeak, Enable Team, Microsoft Research

By Timothy Revell

It can be difficult to communicate when you can only move your eyes, as is often the case for people with ALS (also known as motor neurone disease). Microsoft researchers have developed an app to make talking with your eyes easier, called GazeSpeak.

GazeSpeak runs on a smartphone and uses artificial intelligence to convert eye movements into speech, so a conversation partner can understand what is being said in real time.

The app runs on the listener’s device. They point their smartphone at the speaker as if they are taking a photo. A sticker on the back of the phone, visible to the speaker, shows a grid with letters grouped into four boxes corresponding to looking left, right, up and down. As the speaker gives different eye signals, GazeSpeak registers them as letters.

“For example, to say the word ‘task’ they first look down to select the group containing ‘t’, then up to select the group containing ‘a’, and so on,” says Xiaoyi Zhang, who developed GazeSpeak whilst he was an intern at Microsoft.

GazeSpeak selects the appropriate letter from each group by predicting the word the speaker wants to say based on the most common English words, similar to predictive text messaging. The speaker indicates they have finished a word by winking or looking straight ahead for two seconds. The system also takes into account added lists of words, like names or places that the speaker is likely to use. The top four word predictions are shown onscreen, and the top one is read aloud.

“We’re using computer vision to recognise the eye gestures, and AI to do the word prediction,” says Meredith Morris at Microsoft Research in Redmond, Washington.

The app is designed for people with motor disabilities like ALS, because eye movement can become the only way for people with these conditions to communicate. ALS progressively damages nerve cells, affecting a person’s ability to speak, swallow and eventually breathe. The eye muscles are often some of the last to be affected.

Board of the old

“People can become really frustrated when trying to communicate, so if this app can make things easier that’s a really good thing,” says Matthew Hollis from the Motor Neurone Disease Association.

There are currently limited options for people with ALS to communicate. The most common is to use boards displaying letters in different groups, with a person tracking the speaker’s eye movements as they select letters. But it can take a long time for someone to learn how to interpret these eye movements effectively.

GazeSpeak proved much faster to use in an experiment with 20 people trying both the app and the low-tech boards. Completing a sentence with GazeSpeak took 78 seconds on average, compared with 123 seconds using the boards. The people in the tests did not have ALS, but the team also got feedback on the technology from some people with ALS and their interpreters. One person who tried the device typed a test sentence in just 62 seconds and said he thought it would be even quicker in a real-life situation, as his interpreter can more easily predict what he is likely to say.

“I love the phone technology; I just think that would be so slick,” said one of the interpreters.

Other systems currently use software to track eye movements with infrared cameras. But these are often expensive and bulky, and infrared cameras don’t work very well in sunlight. The GazeSpeak app is portable and comparatively cheap, as it only requires an iOS device, like an iPhone or iPad, with the app installed.

Microsoft will present the app at the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in Colorado in May. The researchers say it will be available on the Apple App Store before the conference, and the source code will be made freely available so that other people can help to improve it.

Aussies on the verge of bionics ‘Holy Grail’ ahead of human trials of brain machine interface technology

Aussies on the verge of bionics ‘Holy Grail’ ahead of human trials of brain machine interface technology

als amyotrophic lateral sclerosis assistive tech Assistive Technology BCI Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) mnd

JUNE 1, 20165:38PM

Australian researchers are leading the way with brain machine interface technology.

Nick Whighamnews.com.au

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IMAGINE being able to communicate with a machine using nothing but your thoughts. 

That is the goal currently being pursued by a team of researchers and engineers at Melbourne University who are leading the way in the hugely significant field of developing brain machine interfaces.

In an effort to accomplish what has been likened to machine telepathy, they have developed a tiny biocompatible implant called a stentrode which gets implanted into a blood vessel next to the brain. The tiny implant records electric activity from a specific part of the brain and the information is then fed into a decoding algorithm which interprets the electric activity, or thoughts.

Dr Tom Oxley is leading the research and perhaps the only thing more impressive than the science involved is the story behind how he secured funding to embark on the project.

While on holiday in New York about four years ago, Dr Oxley sent a cold call e-mail to US Colonel Geoffrey Ling who at the time he had just become the director of the Pentagon’s science and research unit DARPA.

Much to the surprise of the trainee neurologist at Royal Melbourne Hospital he was quickly invited to the US Defence Department’s research agency and found himself pitching his bold idea to its top brass.

They agreed to give him $1 million to get started on his work.

“I don’t think any other body in the world would’ve funded it,” Dr Oxley tells news.com.au. “It was something that was so blue sky and out there.”

Dr Thomas Oxley has been working on this idea since 2007.Source:Supplied

There was some unfounded stigma that come attached with working with DARPA.

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“There are a lot of cynical representations of DARPA about conducting black box evil work,” he says. “But my experience was that of an open, academically and creatively rich environment to pursue next generation research.”

It’s a misconception that extends to his work in brain machine interfaces.

Given the incredible nature of the science, many are quick to jump to lofty conclusions about its future capabilities including speculating about far flung military applications and mind control.

The technology is “an incredible step forward... but it’s a little bit overblown with what’s likely to happen here,” he says, referring to the more “science fiction” possibilities of the technology.

Dr Oxley stressed the implanted device is simply used to record information from the brain, not implanting information into it. “So when people start talking about mind control and things like that, actually this is a technology that is totally controlled by the user… it doesn’t actually work the other way around.”

His team is purely focused on the life altering benefits the technology can bring to the medical industry, primarily in the treatment of paralysis and epilepsy.

The stentrode is inserted into the blood vessel using a catheter.Source:Supplied

From the DARPA funding, Dr Oxley and his team was able to use that to leverage Australian government funding.

Back in Melbourne Terence O’Brien, the head of Melbourne University’s Department of Medicine embraced the project with gusto — something which he referred to as the “Holy Grail for research in bionics”.

He introduced Dr Oxley to engineers Tony Burkitt and David Grayden who at the time were working on a bionic eye. In the following months postdoctoral researcher Nick Opie joined Dr Oxley as a lead researcher on the project.

Fast forward to 2016 and the team had successful results of animal trials published in the journal Nature Biotechnology.

“It’s one thing to prove that we can record that type of data but the next stage is to demonstrate in a human that we can get the human user to control that signal in a way in which is useful,” Dr Oxley says.

Ultimately, the process hinges on the ability of the technology to translate the electric brain activity into useful information. To do so, they require a tailor-made decoding algorithm.

“There is a lot of work being done in this space but what’s lacking now is a kind of framework for people to continue to improve on these algorithms,” Dr Oxley says.

“We are modelling as best we can the decoding algorithms to make it work but really until it’s in (humans) it’s going to be challenging to improve on these systems.”

The group is aiming to carry out human trails in the near future, most likely next year, when the project will really begin to take shape.

“The beginning is probably going to be slow. We are aiming for basic control of a couple different directions on a computer screen with a cursor and then with that we hope to use that to manipulate mobility assist devices such as exoskeletons,” Dr Oxley says.

For those suffering from paralysis or severe spinal cord injuries, the technology offers “the capacity to get information out of their brain to modulate movement systems that will basically enable them to interact with their environment again.”

Another objective is to allow doctors treating a patient with uncontrollable seizures to have a constant data stream of what’s happening in their brain in order to predict and address the issue.

The team is keen to get the human patient trials under way and is certainly optimistic about the potential.

“I think what we’re seeing is the start of a whole new field,” Dr Oxley says.

Dr Tom Oxley and Dr Nick Opie, the lead researchers on the project. Picture: David CairdSource:News Limited