In 2010, at the age of 19, Ian Burkhart took a summer beach vacation. He dove into a wave in shallow water and sustained a severe spinal cord injury. Ian broke his neck and was paralyzed. For him and his family, as for so many others who suffer catastrophic injury, life was forever changed. Doctors told him that an injury like this was not something that could be reversed.

Two years ago, that changed.

Ian had some arm movement but no use of his hands or wrists. Then scientists in Ohio intervened with an emerging technology solution—a brain implant. Their procedure gave Ian the use of his right wrist and hand simply by thinking of the desired movement.

How the Implant Works

The implant in Burkhart’s brain “decodes” the electrical impulses that are his thoughts and stimulates his muscles based on those thoughts, according to an article in Nature. Burkhart is quadriplegic and the first human to be “reanimated” after a paralyzing spinal cord injury. He can now perform six different motions with his wrist and hand.

The Impact of Neurological Implants

This result offers hope to individuals dealing with catastrophic injury, especially paralysis. To the medical teams who serve them, such research is the next frontier in neurological care.  “The first time moving my hand—that was really just like that first flicker of hope,” Burkhart told NPR.

Chad Bouton, the study’s first author, is Vice President of advanced engineering at the Feinstein Institute for Medical Research. “We’re actually rerouting [signals] around the spinal cord injury and then reinserting those signals into the muscles” he told NPR in the same article.

At Paradigm Outcomes, we make it a priority to keep up with cutting edge medical innovations such as brain-computer-interface technology that had shown some promise of connecting our human brain to robotics. And we are excited to monitor evolving scientific explorations, like Mr. Burkhart’s brain implant, that support complex and catastrophic injuries like spinal cord injury. You can continue to keep up with current events by checking back with the blog or connecting on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.