AsianScientist (Feb. 22, 2016) – Scientists are now one step closer to making brain implants feasible, thanks to the invention of a smart chip that facilitates wireless transmission. Their research has been published in IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Circuits & Systems.
Neural implants when embedded in the brain can alleviate the debilitating symptoms of Parkinson’s disease or give paraplegic people the ability to move their prosthetic limbs. However, they need to be connected by wires to an external device outside the body.
For a prosthetic patient, the neural implant is connected to a computer that decodes the brain signals so the artificial limb can move. These external wires are not only cumbersome but the permanent openings which allow the wires into the brain increases the risk of infections.
Instead, scientists at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore) have designed a chip that allows allow the transmission of brain data wirelessly and with high accuracy.
Assistant Professor Arindam Basu from NTU’s School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering said the research team have tested the chip on data recorded from animal models, which showed that it could decode the brain’s signal to the hand and fingers with 95 percent accuracy.
“What we have developed is a very versatile smart chip that can process data, analyse patterns and spot the difference,” explained Basu.
“It is about a hundred times more efficient than current processing chips on the market. It will lead to more compact medical wearable devices, such as portable ECG monitoring devices and neural implants, since we no longer need large batteries to power them.”
To achieve high accuracy in decoding brain signals, implants require thousands of channels of raw data. To wirelessly transmit this large amount of data, more power is also needed which means either bigger batteries or more frequent recharging. This is not feasible as there is limited space in the brain for implants while frequent recharging means the implants cannot be used for long-term recording of signals.
Current wireless implant prototypes thus suffer from a lack of accuracy as they lack the bandwidth to send out thousands of channels of raw data. Instead of enlarging the power source to support the transmission of raw data, Basu and his team tried to reduce the amount of data that needs to be transmitted.
Designed to be extremely power-efficient, the patented smart chip will analyze and decode the thousands of signals from the neural implants in the brain, before compressing the results and sending it wirelessly to a small external receiver. This will reduce data usage by over a thousand times.
Basu is now in talks with Singapore Technologies Electronics Limited to adapt his smart chip that can significantly reduce power consumption and the amount of data transmitted by battery-operated remote sensors, such as video cameras. The chip, measuring 5mm by 5mm can now be licensed by companies from NTU’s commercialisation arm, NTUitive.
The article can be found at: Chen et al. (2015) A 128-Channel Extreme Learning Machine-Based Neural Decoder for Brain Machine Interfaces.
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Source: Nanyang Technological University.
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