One of the best creations that have been made in recent years that have to do with technology are brain-computer interfaces , which are of great help to carry out different research works or to try to help people who suffer from disabilities to restore some of their abilities that they have lost due to said disability. Recently, tiny implants ideal for these machines have been created that would help them be much more effective.
There are today many brain-computer interfaces that use electrodes that are placed directly on the brain of the patient.
An alternative to implanting electrodes in the brain
Normally only a couple of them are inserted, in order to stimulate and control all the electrical activity of a group of neurons within an area of the brain.
It may seem that this is enough, but in truth we realize that it is little if we think that within our brain there are more than 80 million neurons . This is why scientists have been looking for ways to cover many more neurons in the brain for quite some time, without placing as many electrodes on the person’s brain.
A few years ago a group of scientists from different universities in the United States began to develop an alternative to these electrodes that are placed in the brain. The result was tiny implants that are about the size of a grain of salt.
Once these tiny implants are in place, they are powered wirelessly thanks to a small patch that is placed on the patient’s head. The function of this patch is to receive electricity signals from the sensors, in addition to sending them. Therefore, this provokes stimuli in the neurons.
The team is ambitious for the future
One of the tests that was done to verify its operation was to implant almost 50 of these mini implants in a rat . Thanks to the use of the sensors, the team was able to verify that there were signals that were related to brain activity and stimulate some specific places in the brain.
Right now, up to 800 of these sensors could be used to help patients’ brains. In fact, within the team they are ambitious and believe that thousands of these could be used in the future.
The purpose of the team with the development of this system is to create a mechanism that gives scientists new information about the functioning of the brain, with which they could create new methods to try to heal the injuries of people with disabilities.