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Photo: UniMelb
‘Bionic spinal cord’ in trials
Tiny implant may even have the potential
to help people control their limbs.
A
device implanted in a brain blood vessel may one day
enable people with spinal cord injuries to walk again,
University of Melbourne researchers have announced.
Limbs wouldn’t be reactivated, but the person’s direct thought
might be able to control equipment that can move the limbs.
The device being developed would be a minimally invasive brain
Putting a finger on it
Children who trace math problems are
better at solving them, studies find.
“T
he children, as soon as they have become at all expert
in this tracing of the letters, take great pleasure in
repeating it with closed eyes, letting the sandpaper lead
machine interface: a bionic implant that translates thought into action.
It consists of a stent-based electrode, a stentrode, which is
implanted within a blood vessel in the brain. This records the type
of neural activity that has been shown in pre-clinical animal trials to
move limbs through an exoskeleton or a mobility assist device, or
to control bionic limbs.
The device, the size of a small paperclip, will be implanted
during the first human trial, involving three people, at The Royal
Melbourne Hospital in 2017.
The pre-clinical trial results, published in the journal
Nature Biotechnology, show the device is capable of recording
high-quality signals emitted from the brain’s motor cortex, without
the need for high-risk open-brain surgery.
The overall vision is for the device to return function and mobility
to patients with complete paralysis by recording brain activity and
converting the acquired signals into electrical commands.
“As we have access to almost any part of the brain, there’s the
potential to treat a huge range of neurological conditions and it
may be used to treat depression or post-traumatic stress disorder
through stimulation or symptomatic tremor associated with
Parkinson’s disease,” said University of Melbourne biomedical
engineer Dr Nicholas Opie.
“It’s also been thought that we can detect and suppress seizures
in people with epilepsy and it may be used as a conjunctive therapy
for visual restoration with some of the bionic eye work that’s being
done in Melbourne.” ■
them in following the form which they do not see.”
This century-old excerpt from The Montessori Method, by
educator Maria Montessori, describes children tracing letters
to learn how to read. Montessori’s intuition told her this was
effective, but she had no empirical evidence to back this up.
Fast forward to the 1980s, when researchers discovered her
theories were applicable to helping kids learn the alphabet.
This idea is often applied today in early childhood and
kindergarten settings.
Now, University of Sydney research has identified the same
concept applies to basic mathematics.
Studies involving 275 Sydney school children, aged between
9 and 13, found tracing maths problems, while simultaneously
reading them, helped children solve them more quickly and
more easily. Back in the 1900s, Montessori used sandpaper as
tracing material, but these children just used normal paper.
Dr Paul Ginns, lead researcher and educational psychology
expert, said this concept extends to more advanced math.
“These results suggest that Montessori’s ideas for using tracing
ge