Photo: Sally Adee

...: Motor signals recorded from electrodes implanted into the motor cortex of a rhesus monkey “drive” an animated virtual hand, allowing the researchers to test their algorithms. The animated figure should move its fingers in exactly the same way the monkey did when the signals were recorded. The spikes represent motor neurons firing in tandem with finger movements.

The Johns Hopkins brain-computer interface (BCI) is the perfect clearinghouse for the data collected from other research institutions working on the Revolutionizing Prosthetics 2009 project. At another command station in a room down the hall from Thakor's lab, a three-dimensional animation of a rhesus monkey brain is spinning slowly on a screen. The real monkey is sitting in a cage at the University of Rochester, where it has been trained to articulate a very precise series of finger movements similar to what humans do in real life. When the monkey moves its fingers, the raw neuronal data from its motor cortex—gathered by dozens of tiny microelectrodes implanted into its brain—can be put on an FTP server, downloaded, and fed into the BCI in the “invasive” part of the Baltimore lab. That's part of Thakor's DARPA-funded work, which focuses on deciphering the kind of fine and dexterous movements a surface EEG can't provide. “We're trying to explore if dexterous movements can be deciphered using neural signals,” Acharya explains. “So far it looks good.” In fact, Thakor's DARPA group was the first in the world to accurately reconstruct precise, real-time movements of monkeys' fingers. This research is the precursor to implantation of the microelectrodes in people.