
Brain implant restores man's sense of touch and arm movement - n0pe_p0pe
https://www.wired.com/story/a-brain-implant-restored-this-mans-motion-and-sense-of-touch/
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pmoriarty
This makes me wonder:

1 - Since this device can control this person's own movements, could the
movements of somebody else be controlled?

2 - Can the sense of touch this person feel be transmitted to someone else?

3 - Could the sense of touch be "filtered" (like applying a Photoshop filter)?

4 - Could these sensations be recorded and replayed?

At least in principle, all of these should be possible. It seems we're rapidly
moving towards a world where we can control each other's bodies and radically
change or even induce perceptions.

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stinos
Theoretically the answer to all your questions is yes. Simply said (but not
false AFAIK, I work in the field): stimulate the correct group of brain cells
and you can achieve pretty much anything you want; after all everything you
do/feel/think is done by having groups of cells activated and communicating
with each other somehow. The main problem is finding those groups of cells..
There is an incredible amount of research left to do on how to do it because
what we know about the brain is still _much_ less than what we do not know,
and the implementation (hardware etc) is also complicated on all levels you
van imagine.

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Ygg2
Yeah, but what if your sense of touch is different than another's? Like say
you are blind and the way you process touch is completely different.

Not to mention sense of touch isn't standardized by a regulation's body.

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JoeAltmaier
Warning: was diving into waves. A terrible, terrible idea. The hospital in San
Francisco sees about one a month - young person with their whole life ahead of
them, a quadriplegic because they decided to dive into a wave at the beach.

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WilTimSon
Although the system still feels far from perfect: requiring a VHS-sized
control box, a lack of full simulation of natural touch and movement; it's
definitely an amazing achievement. I wonder how feasible production of these
would be in the future and how costly they would be. It seems like specialized
tech that could run a patient thousands of dollars.

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pharke
I'm guessing that the connector and control box are pretty much hand wired
with some printed boards. The hardware cost should be more like $50 if factory
made. It's great to see a prototype like this working but we're
technologically capable of so much more.

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mhh__
That depends on how much signal processing and interfacing needs to be done.
If it needs some serious heavy lifting then $50 might not even cover the FPGA.

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pharke
Why use an FPGA in mass production when an IC would be faster and cheaper?

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mhh__
How many of these would you sell? I would imagine an ASIC manufacturer isn't
going to pick up the phone for less than 10k units.

You can actually buy an FPGA today, too. The added time spent getting
expensive engineers and doctors to integrate and test the ASIC probably
wouldn't be worth it in low volumes.

On top of that if you have complicated signal aquisition circuitry the ADCs
alone might be another $100.

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pharke
If you could perfect a system that restores motion and/or feeling to paralyzed
parts of the human body you could sell millions of units[0]

[0] [https://www.christopherreeve.org/living-with-
paralysis/stats...](https://www.christopherreeve.org/living-with-
paralysis/stats-about-paralysis)

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djohnston
This kind of work is so interesting, I believe U Pitt does a lot of leading
research here.

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ChrisArchitect
change title acronym to Brain-Computer Interface, or Brain Implant or
something

