Miguel Nicolelis at TEDMED 2012

The founder of Duke's Center for Neuroengineering presents his astonishing work on mind-controlled robotic avatars, which have already been successful in primate research.

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  Education

[Adolfo Neto]

Excellent! Great work. Nicolelis is a great scientist.

[Taylor Rosenfeld]

you're an idiot.

[Henrique Costa]

This guy is a god.

[gandalfholopainen]

Wow! I need to understand more of this stuff!

[plavix221]

Thats AVATAR. we are almost there. it only needs more resolution and of course

quadriplegic will experience it first.

[Derek Albietz]

you mean quadriplegic? paraplegic only means one half doesn't work... and you want to "curl your toes"? and feel "normal"? I am a quadriplegic, 10% lung capacity and a weakened heart, and you are worried about toes? at least you can hug someone. feeling normal is kinda a self esteem issue.

[extremophile]

It would be very interesting if instead of/after exoskeletons, they develop some device that would stimulate the muscle itself. I'd guess that they'd be able to make new nerves grow before that gets really useful though, which is good perhaps for most people, but there are some conditions in which the nerves are not just "cut", but have some other form of impairment, that would probably take longer to be fixed biologically, and for that an artificial intermediate device would be great.

[extremophile]

I wonder if one can get phantom robot limbs.

[Rafael Lavor]

And this is how The Matrix was born, kids.

[zeroskie]

Have hope. The hard part is decoding the signals and coding them into movement. One of the applications may be to control an exoskeleton, another may be to re-innervate atrophied nerve pathways using electrical signals.