Restoring Communication and Mobility Through Implantable Brain-Computer Interfaces
Implantable brain-computer interfaces (iBCIs) are poised to revolutionize our ability to restore lost neurologic functions. By recording high resolution neural activity from the brain, the intention of moving one’s hand can be detected and decoded in real-time, toward providing people with motor neuron disease, stroke, or spinal cord injury with restored ability to control communication devices, assistive technologies, and their own limbs. Over the past 20 years, clinical trials of the investigational BrainGate system have demonstrated that people with tetraplegia can control a computer cursor, a tablet computer, and other devices quickly and intuitively, simply by thinking about the movement of their own hand. More recently, for people with profound dysarthria due to motor neuron disease, recordings from speech-related areas of the motor cortex have enabled clinical trial participants to ‘speak’ (brain-to-audible-text) at more than 60 words per minute.
Leigh R. Hochberg, MD, PhD is a neurointensivist and vascular neurologist at Massachusetts General Hospital and Senior Lecturer on Neurology at Harvard Medical School; the L. Herbert Ballou University Professor of Engineering and Professor of Brain Science at Brown University; and Associate Director, VA Center for Neurorestoration and Neurotechnology in Providence. He also directs the MGH Center for Neurotechnology and Neurorecovery, co-founded the Implantable BCI Collaborative Community, and is the IDE Sponsor-Investigator and PI of the BrainGate clinical trials, conducted by a consortium of scientists and clinicians at Brown, Emory, Mass General, VA Providence Healthcare, Stanford, and UC Davis.
Dr. Hochberg’s research focuses on the development and testing of novel neurotechnologies to help people with paralysis and other neurologic disorders. His research with the collaborative BrainGate team has been honored with the Joseph Martin Prize in Basic Research, the Herbert Pardes Prize for Excellence in Clinical Research, the first Israel Brain Technologies international B.R.A.I.N. Prize, the Derek Denny-Brown Young Neurological Scholar Award, the CERF Prize in Medical Engineering, the Paul B. Magnuson Award from the US Department of Veterans Affairs, and the Sean M. Healey International Prize for Innovation in ALS. Dr. Hochberg’s BrainGate research has been published in Nature, New England Journal of Medicine, Lancet, Science Translational Medicine, eLife, Journal of Neuroscience, and the Journal of Neural Engineering.
