DOD Looking to Connect Brain, Prosthetics

The U.S. Department of Defense's (DOD) research agency is looking for partners that can bring sweeping new breakthroughs to its program for creating brain-controlled prosthetics, according to a CQ.com article posted July 31. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) says it is looking for "a new experimental and theoretical paradigm" in order to advance its Human-Assisted Neural Devices (HAND) program "beyond incremental advances in development."

Thanks to advanced body armor and battlefield medicine, an unprecedented number of veterans are surviving battlefield injuries16 injured for every soldier killed, by one government estimate. DARPA says it wants HAND to help restore the livelihood of soldiers who have lost the ability to form short- or long-term memories, move injured limbs, or those who rely on prosthetics, according to the CQ.com article ("Defense Department Looking for Brain-Controlled Prosthetics," by Rob Margetta).

A solicitation from DARPA dated July 17 said the agency was looking to expand its knowledge of the processes the brain uses to perform tasks, with the goal of turning those processes into algorithms that could be integrated into robotic prosthetics. At its most basic, the solicitation asks for "methods of analysis and interpretation that are more analogous to processes used by the brain." Those methods should help reduce a user's training time on such a device, the solicitation said.

DARPA defines HAND as a research platform for developing devices that can use brain activity for "closed-loop" control, meaning that they would accept motor commands from the brain and provide it with sensory feedback. HAND research has formed the basis of DARPA's Revolutionizing Prosthetics program, which has promised to create a fully functional upper limb that responds to direct neural control within this decade. DARPA releases say HAND has plotted the brain's motor signals to the extent that a brain-controlled robotic arm is feasible, but it still faces the challenge of devising noninvasive brain activity sensors and creating a sensory input system that could give the user feedback.

In its latest HAND solicitation, DARPA asks for new concepts dealing with the following:

New ways to extract motor function signals from the brain, including those that work at the neurotransmitter post-synaptic levels. Motor signal data extraction that looks at task functions that are distributed across several regions of the brain (instead of neural functions that are focused in separate areas), which could lead to more robust prosthetic control. Methods of control that attempt to figure out how neurons and synapses organize and transmit information because such methods could work more naturally and with less computer programming necessary. Multiple methods of sensory feedback (while some current devices that have emerged from HAND research provide a user with visual cues, DARPA wants new, more natural stimuli). Flexible prosthetic control methods that can compensate for the brain's natural adaptations.

DOD Looking to Connect Brain, Prosthetics

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