The US Professor and visionary, Norbert Wiener, founded the field of Cybernetics in the 1940's. He envisaged that one day electronic systems he called "Nervous Prostheses" would be developed that would allow those with spinal injuries to control their paralysed limbs using signals detected in their brain.
In the UK two internationally renowned professors, in the Department of Cybernetics at the University of Reading, Brian Andrews and Kevin Warwick, together with the eminent neurosurgeon Peter Teddy have just taken a step closer to this dream. The team have come together from different branches of Cybernetics and Neurosurgery. Kevin Warwick specializes in the field of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics and Brian Andrews in the field of Biomedical Engineering, Neural Prostheses and Spinal Injuries. Peter Teddy has a long involvement with neural implants and is the head of Neurosurgery at Oxford. Although seemingly worlds apart, these fields have many common threads.
The principal investigators Andrews, Warwick and Teddy, lead a large team of surgeons and researchers including, Brian Gardner, Ali Jamous, Amjad Shad and Mark Gasson of the world famous National Spinal Injuries Centre (NSIC)-Stoke Mandeville Hospital, the Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford and the University of Reading, UK. The team are supported by the David Tolkien Trust, Computer Associates, Tumbleweed and Fujitsu.
A sophisticated new microelectronic implant has been developed that allows two-way connection to the nervous system. In one direction, the natural activity of nerves are detected and in the other, nerves can be activated by applied electrical pulses. It is envisaged that such neural connections may, in the future, help people with spinal cord injury or limb amputation.
Cybernetics News
08-22-2002, 01:22 PM
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