In January 2018, the car Tonya Illman was riding in got stuck in the sand. They were on Wedge Island, 180 kilometers north of the Australian city of Perth; so while they waited for roadside assistance to arrive, Tonya took a walk on the beach.
And it was there, among the dunes, where saw something sticking out of the sand. It looked like an old bottle and he picked it up thinking it would look good on his shelf. Then, as they emptied it of sand, they found a note: a form on the back, a small handwritten note on the back.
Tonya had just found a message that had been thrown into the sea from the German ship Paula on June 12, 1886. A message that had taken 132 years to reach its destination. Well, this, just like this, is how we tried to restore sight to blind people: throwing electric bottles into the sea of neurons in our brain.
Now a Spanish team wants to change that.
What has happened? That a team from the Miguel Hernández University of Elche and the Center for Biomedical Research Network (CIBER) just published data from a new “round-trip” cortical machine vision system; that is, capable of adjusting stimulation according to the neuronal response.
The results (despite being in a preclinical phase) they are excellent.
How does it work? It is a device of about four millimeters with 100 microelectrodes that is implanted through a small hole of about 10 millimeters. The interesting thing is that it is a system that records and stimulates at the same time. This is what allows you to adapt the stimulus patterns in real time and fine-tune the stimulation to adjust it.
And that has been the complicated part. In the end, sending stimuli to the brain is trivial; But during all these years it was a lot like throwing a bottle into the sea: I knew what you were sending, but not what was being received. With these new ones closed, everything changes.
Are they the first to get it? Reviewing clinical trials databasesit seems that there are a couple of other companies developing the same type of devices: the trend seems clear and we can see how the market is changing from the
They seem to be a little more advanced, but not too much. Which is good news for the UMH and for Spain. It is clear that the only way we have right now to move forward on this problem is ‘personalizing’ the way systems stimulate the brain. And the only way to do it is through these closed circuits.
It is still curious that the field of research has survived such notorious failures as those of retinal prostheses (which left many people in the lurch). But here we are, one step closer to being able to look back.
Image | Ruiqi Kong
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