‘Hello world’ - Those two words were tweeted by an Australian man paralysed with ALS using only his thoughts, thanks to a tiny brain implant.
The brain computer interface was developed by neurosurgeon doctor Thomas Oxley from Melbourne and his company Synchron.
It offers hope for millions of people who are paralysed or have other neurological diseases.
Thomas J. Oxley speaks at SESSION 3 at TED2022: A New Era. April 10-14, 2022, Vancouver, BC, Canada. Photo: Ryan Lash / TED Photo: Ryan Lash
When Oxley heard about brain computer interfaces around 2006, he had a feeling that this would change the world for the better, he says.
Synchron’s device works by inserting a type of metal scaffold in a blood vessel in the brain's motor cortex, with sensors attached, which connect to a little box in your chest that sends information via Bluetooth, he says.
"Then there's a little box on the outside, about the size of an iPhone, which does the decoding of the brain signals that sends out commands that can control Windows 10, Apple, any kind of personal computer.
“So the idea is to take over mouse and keyboard control for people whose hands can no longer control mouse and keyboards.
“For people who have had that taken away from them giving it back is really potentially hugely impactful.”
The computer is taught to perform a certain action when it sees a certain brain pattern, Oxley says.
"So it's kind of like when you first pick up a PlayStation controller and you're hitting the buttons. You have to kind of look down and look at the button, but then after a while you stop looking at it.
“Your brain figures it out and you stop thinking about what button you're hitting.
“That's what our patients are describing. So once you get used to it, it becomes second nature and you start navigating your way through the operating system on the computer.”
Patients have to be on blood thinning medicines to stop blood clots forming, he says.
"It's the same idea with a cardiac pacemaker.
“Cardiac pacemaker sits inside a blood vessel in your heart and back in the ‘80s and ‘90s there were big concerns from the cardiology community that the blood vessels would block up.
“And now there are 1,000,000 pacemakers put in a year, and we understand how to do it safely, so we've been able to leverage and borrow all that learned information over a bunch of decades.”
So far, they’ve been able to get the device to decode up to nine different movements, he says.
When their first patient was able to write out his first sentence, there was a sense of joy that he and his wife were able to reclaim a part of their lives, Oxley says.
"We put him onto WhatsApp immediately, like an hour later, and imagine going from needing your wife right next to you to interpret everything going on to then suddenly being able to use WhatsApp.
“So she could then leave the house, like they were able to communicate. She could go and be more independent. He could be more independent so it was really powerful.
“He's been using Windows 10, online banking, online shopping, emailing. One of our other patients wrote a whole book.”
Ethical concerns usually surrounds these ventures, as with Elon Musk’s brain chip project, but Oxley says their approach is different to what he is going.
“I'm not underplaying the fact that this is a device that goes into the brain and kind of reads thoughts. I mean the thoughts that we're reading are to do with moving your wrist, not your innermost emotional fears or thought, that's not what we're doing.
“I think this is probably one of the biggest ethical challenges that’s faced medicine since the genetic revolution.
“I think it's a technology that can go in either direction and there's so much potential for help for some people that it's worth taking this on, but we have to take the risks really seriously.”
They have a Neuro Ethics Committee and charter that they are committed to, he says.
“I think we've set the vision of our company to improve lives to help people, we're not augmenting or creating superhumans or anything like that. Everything we're doing is to relieve people of suffering.”
They have six sites across the United States and Australia and are hoping for a chance to get one running in Auckland, he says.
His dream is to complete clinical trials successfully so that paralysed people can reconnect to the world.
"So we ask neurologists to refer their patients who have neuromuscular or stroke or spinal cord injury conditions and then we enroll them in the study and if all the testing goes right, then they get the implant and then they work with our engineers to get it working.
“We're still in the early stages of testing this out and building the software, but it's a journey that we're on with the patients."
