Engineer Stimulates Paralyzed Limbs into Working with Electrical Hacking

A engineer might have just found a way to revive paralyzed limbs. Matthew Schiefer is an engineer for Case Western Reserve University who has been working on a way to revive the limbs through an electrical hack. He has found a way to hack into the nerves of a patient's body. Shciefer focuses on the damaged nerves and uses electricity to motivate them to move again. Results have shown that this actually does work and could lead to ending paralysis.

Scientific studies have shown that those who have experience spinal cord injuries are unable to send signals to their lower body muscles, causing them to be paralyzed. Schiefer wanted to find a way to ignite the nerves that are no longer responding. The answer was to bypass the problem by sending electrical pulses straight to the nerves. This causes the nerves to become stimulated because they are tricked into believing that they are receiving messages from your brain still.

Matthew Schiefer had to become creative to make his vision a reality. His first step was to develop a working flat interface nerve electrode. This interface flattens the nerves in order to bring fiber bundles to the surface. This is an important step because the closer they are to the electrodes the better the electric signal is to shock the muscles into movement. Tests were then conducted once the electrode unit was connected to the body.

The results proved to be amazing. Schiefer implanted the device onto the femoral nerves of seven different patients. He then used pulses of 250 microseconds long to activate the muscles in their legs. Results showed that the pulses enabled the patients to stand on the leg and walk with it. However, since the pulses were not long enough the patients were unable to bend their legs completely. Schiefer believes that this could easily be solved through longer electrical pulses taking place.

Even though this news is exciting we must understand that it is still years from becoming an actual medical tool. Scientists spend years perfecting their technologies before using them. This is to ensure that all possible positive and negative outcomes are studied and that no one will be hurt. It is interesting though to know that someone has created a way to stimulate paralyzed body parts into moving again. The future is bright for those who did not think it was too bright.