Parkinson’s disease sufferers and amputees could be among those to benefit from a low-power microchip that can be implanted in the brain and send signals wirelessly to implants and prosthetics.
Developed at Singapore’s Nanyang Technical University (NTU), the chip is claimed to be 100 times more efficient than existing devices to process and decode the signals sent and received by the brain.
The research team have tested the chip on data recorded from animal models, which showed that it could decode the brain’s signal to the hand and fingers with 95 percent accuracy.
According to the scientists, this will lead to more compact wearable devices.
Arindam Basu, assistant professor from NTU’s School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering said: “It is about a hundred times more efficient than current processing chips on the market. It will lead to more compact medical wearable devices, such as portable ECG monitoring devices and neural implants, since we no longer need large batteries to power them”.
Parkinson’s patients sometimes have implants that send electrical signals to calm the debilitating tremors and stiffness associated with the disease; paraplegics and amputees can have implants which control the movement of artificial limbs or devices to help with movement.
In order to receive the huge amount of data the brain produces, current devices have to receive and send through many channels. This can make them cumbersome, and they often need a battery.
For patients with prostheses, the implanted translation devices are often linked to an external processing computer by wires coming out of the head. This can lead to life-threatening infection.
The new devices analyse the patterns of the data it receives from the brain and spot abnormal or unusual patterns. They can then send back important details wirelessly to a small external receiver in a compressed package, instead of sending the whole data stream.
“What we have developed is a very versatile smart chip that can process data, analyse patterns and spot the difference,” added Mr Basu.
Scientists believe the device could also be useful for non-medical applications, such as a remote video camera, where the chip can be programmed to send a video back to the servers only when a specific type of car or something out of the ordinary is detected, such as an intruder.
The findings were published last month in the prestigious journal, IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Circuits & Systems.
0300 303 3504