Community Event: Toward Clinically Viable Brain-Machine Interfaces

Toward Clinically Viable Brain-Machine Interfaces
Krishna Shenoy, Director of Neural Prosthetic Systems Lab (NPSL) and Co-Director of Neural Prosthetic Translational Lab (NPTL), Stanford University
Thomas McMahon Memorial Lecture
School of Engineering and Applied Sciences

NOTE: A Bioengineering Poster Session will follow Dr. Shenoy’s talk, with delicious food and beverage. These events are part of the Bio Expo 2014 Cell-ebration. The Cell-ebration is open to anybody who self-identifies as being part of the Harvard Bioengineering community: researchers, postdocs, graduate and undergraduate students are encouraged to participate in the event. All are welcome to partake in the activities.

Brain-Machine Interfaces (BMIs) aim to help people with paralysis by translating neural signals from the brain into control signals for guiding computer cursors, prosthetic arms, and other assistive devices. Intracortical electrode arrays measure action potentials and local field potentials from individual neurons, or small populations of neurons, in the motor cortex of the brain and can provide considerable information for controlling prostheses. Despite several compelling proof-of-concept laboratory animal experiments and ongoing FDA Phase I clinical trials, at least three key challenges remain which, if left unaddressed, may hamper the translation of these systems into widespread clinical use. I will briefly review these challenges: (1) achieving able-bodied levels of performance across tasks and across environments, (2) achieving robustness across multiple years, (3) and restoring able-bodied quality proprioception and somatosensation. I will also describe some emerging opportunities for meeting these challenges, as well as recent results from our laboratory. If these challenges can be met, intracortically-based neural prostheses may achieve full clinical viability and help ncreasing larger populations.