BrainGate

Dummy unit illustrating the design of a BrainGate interface

BrainGate is a brain implant system developed by the bio-tech company Cyberkinetics in 2008
in conjunction with the Department of Neuroscience at Brown University. The Braingate
technology and related Cyberkinetics assets are now owned by privately held Braingate, LLC.[1]
The device was designed to help those who have lost control of their limbs, or other bodily
functions, such as patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) or spinal cord injury. The
computer chip, which is implanted into the brain, monitors brain activity in the patient and
converts the intention of the user into computer commands.
Currently the chip uses 96 hair-thin electrodes that sense the electro-magnetic signature of
neurons firing in specific areas of the brain, for example, the area that controls arm movement.
The activity is translated into electrically charged signals and are then sent and decoded using a
program, which can move a robotic arm, a computer cursor, or even a wheelchair. According to
the Cyberkinetics' website, three patients have been implanted with the BrainGate system. The
company has confirmed that one patient (Matt Nagle) has a spinal cord injury, whilst another has
advanced ALS.
In addition to real-time analysis of neuron patterns to relay movement, the Braingate array is also
capable of recording electrical data for later analysis. A potential use of this feature would be for
a neurologist to study seizure patterns in a patient with epilepsy.
In 2009, a monkey code named JI1021 used a device very similar to BrainGate to control a
robotic arm.[2]

'BrainGate' Brain-Machine-Interface takes shape

An implantable, brain-computer interface the size of an aspirin has been clinically

tested on humans by American company Cyberkinetics. The 'BrainGate' device can
provide paralysed or Motor-impaired patients a mode of communication through the
translation of thought into direct computer control. The technology driving this
breakthrough in the Brain-Machine-Interface field has a myriad of potential
applications, including the development of human augmentation for military and
commercial purposes.
"The goal of the BrainGate program is to develop a fast, reliable and unobtrusive
connection between the brain of a severely disabled person and a personal
computer" stated Tim Surgenor, President and CEO of Cyberkinetics. "We [hope] to
provide paralysed individuals with a gateway through which they can access the
broad capabilities of computers, control devices in the surrounding Environment,
and even move their own limbs."
Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh have already demonstrated that a
monkey can feed itself with a robotic arm simply by using signals from its brain, an
advance that could enhance prosthetics for people, especially those with spinal cord
injuries. Now, using the BrainGate system in the current human trials, a 25 year old
quadriplegic has successfully been able to switch on lights, adjust the volume on a
TV, change channels and read e-mail using only his brain. Crucially, the patient was
able to do these tasks while carrying on a conversation and moving his head at the
same time.
John Donoghue, the chair of the Department of Neuroscience at Brown University,
led the original research project and went on to co-found Cyberkinetics, where he is
currently chief scientific officer overseeing the clinical trial. "The development of the
BrainGate program is the culmination of 10 years of research in my academic
laboratory at Brown University. We have not only demonstrated in preclinical studies
that BrainGate can remain safely implanted in the [monkey] brain for at least two
years, but we have shown that it can safely be removed as well."
About the BrainGate device
The BrainGate Neural Interface Device is a proprietary brain-computer interface that
consists of an internal neural signal sensor and external processors that convert
neural signals into an output signal under the users own control. The sensor
consists of a tiny chip smaller than a baby aspirin, with one hundred electrode
sensors each thinner than a hair that detect brain cell electrical activity.
The BrainGate technology platform was designed to take advantage of the fact that

many patients with motor Impairment have an intact brain that can produce
movement commands. This may allow the BrainGate system to create an output
signal directly from the brain, bypassing the route through the nerves to the
muscles that cannot be used in paralysed people.
The chip is implanted on the surface of the brain in the motor cortex area that
controls movement. In the pilot version of the device, a cable connects the sensor
to an external signal processor in a cart that contains computers. The computers
translate brain activity and create the communication output using custom
decoding software. Importantly, the entire BrainGate system was specifically
designed for clinical use in humans and thus, its manufacture, assembly and testing
are intended to meet human safety requirements. Five quadriplegics patients in all
are enrolled in the pilot study, which was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug
Administration (FDA).
The Future of Neural-Interfaces
Cyberkinetics has a vision, CEO Tim Surgenor explained to Gizmag, but it is not
promising "miracle cures", or that quadriplegic people will be able to walk again yet. Their primary goal is to help restore many activities of daily living that are
impossible for paralysed people and to provide a platform for the development of a
wide range of other assistive devices.
"Today quadriplegic people are satisfied if they get a rudimentary connection to the
outside world. What we're trying to give them is a connection that is as good and
fast as using their hands. We're going to teach them to think about moving the
cursor using the part of the brain that usually controls the arms to push keys and
create, if you will, a mental device that can input information into a computer. That
is the first application, a kind of prosthetic, if you will. Then it is possible to use the
computer to control a robot arm or their own arm, but that would be down the
road."
Existing technology stimulates muscle groups that can make an arm move. The
problem Surgenor and his team faced was in creating an input or control signal.
With the right control signal they found they could stimulate the right muscle
groups to make arm movement.
"Another application would be for somebody to handle a tricycle or exercise
machine to help patients who have a lot of trouble with their skeletal muscles. But
walking, I have to say, would be very complex. There's a lot of issues with balance
and that's not going to be an easy thing to do, but it is a goal."
Cyberkinetics hopes to refine the BrainGate in the next two years to develop a
wireless device that is completely implantable and doesn't have a plug, making it

safer and less visible. And once the basics of brain mapping are worked out there is
potential for a wide variety of further applications, Surgenor explains.
"If you could detect or predict the onset of epilepsy, that would be a huge
therapeutic application for people who have seizures, which leads to the idea of a
'pacemaker for the brain'. So eventually people may have this technology in their
brains and if something starts to go wrong it will take a therapeutic action. That
could be available by 2007 to 2008."
Surgenor also sees a time not too far off where normal humans are interfacing with
BrainGate technology to enhance their relationship with the digital world - if they're
willing to be implanted.
"If we can figure out how to make this device cheaper, there might be applications
for people to control machines, write software or perform intensive actions. But
that's a good distance away. Right now the only way to get that level of detail from
these signals is to actually have surgery to place this on the surface of the brain. It's
not possible to do this with a non-invasive approach. For example, you can have an
EEG and if you concentrate really hard you can think about and move a cursor on a
screen, but if someone makes a loud noise or you get interrupted, you lose that
ability. What we're trying to make here is a direct connection. The [BrainGate] is
going to be right there and you won't have to think about it."

What is Brain Gate Technology?

Posted by Chandu on July 20th, 2010
Developed in 2008 by the Cyberkinetics a bio-tech company in combination with Department of
Neuroscience at Brown University, Brain Gate is a brain implant mind-to-movement system
useful for people with neurologic disease, spinal cord injury or limb loss to sense, transmit and
analyse through the language of neurons. The main principle behind the Brain Gate System is to
communicate and control common every-day functions literally through thought and with intact
brain function, brain signals are generated even though they are not sent to the arms, hands and
legs. These signals are interpreted and translated into cursor movements allowing the user to
control a computer with only his thought like a man moves a mouse using his hands.
The existing technology stimulates muscle groups that can make an arm move. The problem was
in creating an input or control signal. With the right control signal they found they could
stimulate the right muscle groups to make arm movement through Brain Gate. The main aim of
the Brain Gate program is to develop a fast, reliable and unobtrusive connection between brain of
a severely disabled person and a personal computer.

The Brain Gate Neural Interface device is a proprietary brain-computer interface that consists of
an internal neural signal sensor and external processors that convert neural signals into an output
signal under the users own control. The sensor consists of a tiny chip smaller than a baby aspirin,
with 100 electrode sensors each thinner than a hair that sense the electro-magnetic signature of
neurons firing in specific areas of the brain, for example, the area that controls arm movement.
The activity is further translated into electrically charged signals and is then sent and decoded
using a program, which can move a robotic arm, a computer cursor, or even a wheelchair.

The chip is implanted on the surface of the brain in the motor cortex area that controls
movement. In the pilot version of the device, a cable connects the sensor to an external signal
processor in a cart that contains computers. The computers translate brain activity and create the
communication output using custom decoding software.
Matthew Nagle, a 25-year-old Massachusetts man with a severe spinal cord injury,has been
paralyzed from the neck down since 2001.After taking part in a clinical trial of this system, he
has opened e-mail, switched TV channels, turned on lights. He even moved a robotic hand from
his wheelchair. This marks the first time that neural movement signals have been recorded and
decoded in a human with spinal cord injury. The system is also the first to allow a human to
control his surrounding environment using his mind.
Rats implanted with BCIs in Theodore Bergers experiments. Several laboratories have managed
to record signals from monkey and rat cerebral cortexes in order to operate BCIs to carry out
movement. In 2009, monkeys have navigated computer cursors on screen and commanded
robotic arms to perform simple tasks simply by thinking about the task and without any motor
output.
Conclusion: The idea of moving robots or prosthetic devices not by manual control, but by mere
thinking (i.e., the brain activity of human subjects) has been a fascinated approach. Medical
cures are unavailable for many forms of neural and muscular paralysis. The enormity of the
deficits caused by paralysis is a strong motivation to pursue BMI solutions. So this idea helps
many patients to control the prosthetic devices of their own by simply thinking about the task.
Cyberkinetics hopes to refine the BrainGate in the next two years to develop a wireless device
that is completely implantable and doesnt have a plug, making it safer and less visible. And once
the basics of brain mapping are worked out there is potential for a wide variety of further
applications.
This technology is well supported by the latest fields of Biomedical Instrumentation,
Microelectronics, signal processing, Artificial Neural Networks and Robotics which has
overwhelming developments. Hope these systems will be effectively implemented for many
Biomedical applications.

BrainGate gives paralysed the power of mind

control

Paul Harris

The Observer, Sunday 17 April 2011

Article history

John Donoghue, the founder of BrainGate, has developed technology that helps paraplegics
move their limbs through thought. Photograph: Jamie James Medina for the Observer
The robotic arm clutched a glass and swung it over a series of coloured dots that resembled a
Twister gameboard. Behind it, a woman sat entirely immobile in a wheelchair. Slowly, the arm
put the glass down, narrowly missing one of the dots. "She's doing that!" exclaims Professor
John Donoghue, watching a video of the scene on his office computer though the woman
onscreen had not moved at all. "She actually has the arm under her control," he says, beaming
with pride. "We told her to put the glass down on that dot."
The woman, who is almost completely paralysed, was using Donoghue's groundbreaking
technology to control the robot arm using only her thoughts. Called BrainGate, the device is
implanted into her brain and hooked up to a computer to which she sends mental commands. The
video played on, giving Donoghue, a silver-haired and neatly bearded man of 62, even more
reason to feel pleased. The patient was not satisfied with her near miss and the robot arm lifted
the glass again. After a brief hover, the arm positioned the glass on the dot.

The tiny BrainGate sensor. Photograph: Chitose Suzuki/AP

This is the remarkable world of the brain-computer interface, or BCI, of which BrainGate is one
of the leading devices and Donoghue one of its most successful pioneers. It is a branch of science
exploring how computers and the human brain can be meshed together. It sounds like science
fiction (and can look like it too), but it is motivated by a desire to help chronically injured
people. They include those who have lost limbs, people with Lou Gehrig's disease, or those who
have been paralysed by severe spinal-cord injuries. But the group of people it might help the
most are those whom medicine assumed were beyond all hope: sufferers of "locked-in
syndrome".
These are often stroke victims whose perfectly healthy minds end up trapped inside bodies that
can no longer move. The most famous example was French magazine editor Jean-Dominique
Bauby who managed to dictate a memoir, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, by blinking one eye.
In the book, Bauby, who died in 1997 shortly after the book was published, described the prison
his body had become for a mind that still worked normally.
Donoghue believes that BrainGate would have opened Bauby's prison door, even if just a little.
"I would have every expectation that if we had put BrainGate in his brain, it would have
immediately started giving us signals," Donoghue says.
Donoghue and his team have devoted years of research to BrainGate, first successfully testing
the technology on monkeys and then moving to a groundbreaking set of clinical trials using
human subjects. Now the project is involved with a second set of human trials, pushing the
technology to see how far it goes and trying to miniaturise it and make it wireless for a better fit
in the brain. BrainGate's concept is simple. It posits that the problem for most patients does not
lie in the parts of the brain that control movement, but with the fact that the pathways connecting
the brain to the rest of the body, such as the spinal cord, have been broken. BrainGate plugs into
the brain, picks up the right neural signals and beams them into a computer where they are
translated into moving a cursor or controlling a computer keyboard. By this means, paralysed
people can move a robot arm or drive their own wheelchair, just by thinking about it.
In his book Bauby called his immobilised body a diving bell and his mind a butterfly trapped
inside. He described his sadness at being unable to talk back when his loved ones spoke to him
on the phone. "How dearly I would love to be able to respond with something other than silence
to those tender calls," he wrote. The woman on the video that Donoghue just played has almost

the exact same condition Bauby had. Now she is able to talk to Donoghue over the internet,
moving a cursor over a keyboard with her mind and communicating much faster than Bauby did.
Donoghue works from inside a rambling old mansion perched on top of a hill. But the offices of
the Brown Institute for Brain Science are not really the stuff of old horror movies. The pleasantlooking building is part of Brown University in the pretty college town of Providence, Rhode
Island, on the New England coast.
It is here that he and his team are decoding the language of the human brain. This language is
made up of electronic signals fired by billions of neurons and it controls everything from our
ability to move, to think, to remember and even our consciousness itself. Donoghue's genius was
to develop a deceptively small device that can tap directly into the brain and pick up those
signals for a computer to translate them. Gold wires are implanted into the brain's tissue at the
motor cortex, which controls movement. Those wires feed back to a tiny array an information
storage device attached to a "pedestal" in the skull. Another wire feeds from the array into a
computer. A test subject with BrainGate looks like they have a large plug coming out the top of
their heads. Or, as Donoghue's son once described it, they resemble the "human batteries" in The
Matrix.
BrainGate's highly advanced computer programs are able to decode the neuron signals picked up
by the wires and translate them into the subject's desired movement. In crude terms, it is a form
of mind-reading based on the idea that thinking about moving a cursor to the right will generate
detectably different brain signals than thinking about moving it to the left.
The technology has developed rapidly, and last month BrainGate passed a vital milestone when
one paralysed patient went past 1,000 days with the implant still in her brain and allowing her to
move a computer cursor with her thoughts. The achievement, reported in the prestigious Journal
of Neural Engineering, showed that the technology can continue to work inside the human body
for unprecedented amounts of time.
Donoghue talks enthusiastically of one day hooking up BrainGate to a system of electronic
stimulators plugged into the muscles of the arm or legs. That would open up the prospect of
patients moving not just a cursor or their wheelchair, but their own bodies. "We are working on a
system where there is a stimulator in another part of the body wired to the muscle, and when it's
activated you can get opening and closing of the hand and movement of the arm."

The late Matt Nagle, who first tested the BrainGate device. He
was paralysed by a spinal cord injury. Photograph: Rick Friedman
It is a remarkable idea with humble beginnings. The first BrainGate patient, a quadraplegic
called Matthew Nagle, was plugged into a computer in 2004. Nagle, a keen young sports fan, had
been stabbed while trying to help a friend in a fight. The blade had severed his spinal cord.
Donoghue had no idea if Nagle's motor cortex would still be able to send the right signals for
movement. "The big moment was when we first turned on the recording electrode so we could
peer into the brain. Except for brief moments in the operating room, we never had the
opportunity to do that in humans," Donoghue says of BrainGate's big breakthrough moment.
It was tense. If Nagle's motor cortex was no longer working healthily, the entire BrainGate
project could have been rendered pointless. But when Nagle was plugged in and asked to
imagine moving his limbs, the signals beamed out with a healthy crackle. "We asked him to
imagine moving his arm to the left and to the right and we could hear the activity," Donoghue
says. When Nagle first moved a cursor on a screen using only his thoughts, he exclaimed: "Holy
shit!"
Nagle rapidly became a poster boy for BrainGate, eventually learning to play simple computer
games, operate a TV and send and receive emails. Sadly, he died in 2007 of an infection. "It was
awful. Just awful when Matt died. We were all very much attached," Donoghue says. "I am
trying to make people who are in a terrible state have a much better life. Right now, anything that
we can do for them is a huge improvement."
That is no doubt true. But BrainGate and other BCI projects have also piqued the interest of the
government and the military. BCI is melding man and machine like no other sector of medicine
or science and there are concerns about some of the implications. First, beyond detecting and
translating simple movement commands, BrainGate may one day pave the way for mind-reading.
A device to probe the innermost thoughts of captured prisoners or dissidents would prove very
attractive to some future military or intelligence service. Second, there is the idea that BrainGate
or other BCI technologies could pave the way for robot warriors controlled by distant humans
using only their minds. At a conference in 2002, a senior American defence official, Anthony

Tether, enthused over BCI. "Imagine a warrior with the intellect of a human and the immortality
of a machine." Anyone who has seen Terminator might worry about that.
Donoghue acknowledges the concerns but has little time for them. When it comes to mindreading, current BrainGate technology has enough trouble with translating commands for making
a fist, let alone probing anyone's mental secrets. "There are unrealistic fears. So I am not too
worried that we are going to tap into your brain," he says.
As for robot warriors, Donoghue was slightly more circumspect. At the moment most BCI
research, including BrainGate projects, that touch on the military is focused on working with
prosthetic limbs for veterans who have lost arms and legs. But Donoghue thinks it is healthy for
scientists to be aware of future issues. "As long as there is a rational dialogue and scientists think
about where this is going and what is the reasonable use of the technology, then we are on a good
path," he says.
Donoghue comes across as a pragmatic and careful scientist. Perhaps that comes from his
humble background as the son of a working-class Boston Irish bricklayer father and a housewife
mother. Or from an academic career spent almost entirely in the same institution. But he does
allow himself to dream, just a little, of where BrainGate's technology might go one day. His team
are already working on a miniaturised and wireless version. Although it has not been implanted
in a human yet, that new version of BrainGate will remove the need for a "plug" in the skull and
could allow patients to be permanently hooked up. The prototype looks like a large, flattened
memory stick and will go inside the head. It would communicate wirelessly with a computer
worn on a belt.
So no wonder Donoghue can dream of a future where BrainGate and other devices can restore
full mobility to those from whom physical movement has been stolen. "The really way-off
treatment, which I will never see, is that we connect BrainGate, maybe four arrays in the two leg
and two arm areas of the brain, and put it out to all the muscles with stimulators and then the
subject is playing basketball or something," he says. "There is no reason why with enough
knowledge and enough time that we couldn't do that."
It will not be soon though; almost certainly not in Donoghue's lifetime. "One hundred years from
now, when people are walking around with an artificial nervous system made of wires and chips,
people will say, 'I bet they didn't imagine this.'"
One person who did think about it was Bauby. At the end of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly he
dreams of one day being let out of his prison. "Does the cosmos contain keys for opening up my
diving bell? A subway line with no terminus? A currency strong enough to buy my freedom
back? We must keep looking." Bauby died before there was much hope for that. Others similarly
stricken in the future may be luckier.