>>Monkey brain controls distant robot movement

LONDON (Reuters) - Brain signals from a monkey in a laboratory in North Carolina have been used to control the movement of a robot arm over the Internet at a university 600 miles (1,000 km) away, American scientists said.

They believe the experiment could form the basis of brain-interface machines that could allow paralysed patients to move prosthetic limbs.

"It was an amazing sight to see the robot in my lab move, knowing that it was being driven by signals from a monkey brain at Duke (university)," Mandayam Srinivasan, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), said in a statement.

"It was as if the monkey had a 600-mile-long virtual arm."

Scientists from MIT and Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, implanted electrodes in the monkey's brain and recorded the brain activity as the animal learned tasks and moved its limbs.

In a study in the science journal Nature, they described how they fed the information into a computer and used mathematical methods to predict hand trajectories in real-time as the monkeys learned to make different types of hand movements.

After the scientists were convinced the computer analysis could predict hand trajectory from brain signal patterns, they used the brain signals from the monkey as processed by the computer to allow the animal to control a robot arm.

"When we initially conceived the idea of using monkey brain signals to control a distant robot across the Internet, we were not sure how variable delays in signal transmission would affect the outcome...it worked out beautifully," said Srinivasan.

Miguel Nicolelis, a professor of neurobiology at Duke, said the system offered hope of restoring some motor function for paralysed patients.<<

-- Anonymous, November 16, 2000

Answers

They must be monitoring him regularly at the university mention.......can't say I've ever heard of Duke University in Durham...must be a top secret research lab... ;)

-- Anonymous, November 16, 2000

I think the scientists were hoping this would allow Monkey's Heed to remotely operate a Mecha-Reid robot for Saturday's game. The robot could then rake revenge on Tyneside for all the insulting songs and abuse from the Mag crowd, while he remained safely ensconced with an extra large box of Fife bananas.

Or something like that... ;-)

-- Anonymous, November 16, 2000