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http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/science/science-robot.html

November 15, 2000

Monkey Brain Controls Distant Robot Movement

By REUTERS

LONDON, Nov 15 - 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 away, American scientists said on
Wednesday.

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,'' Mandayam
Srinivasan, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 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.


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