Directly interfacing with the nervous system to restore lost functions and enhance human capability
Our collaborative team includes engineers, clinicians, and scientists from Johns Hopkins Medicine, the Intelligent Systems Center (ISC), and across APL. Our researchers are developing novel interfaces to the central and peripheral nervous systems to restore lost functions and augment natural abilities by interpreting and stimulating neural activity.
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We are creating hardware and software technologies aimed at restoring lost function to individuals living with sensory, motor, or cognitive impairments, including spinal cord injuries, upper-extremity amputations, and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). This includes an effort to develop advanced neurally integrated prostheses that can restore the sense of touch, including sensing temperature, weight, and texture. The team is also working to create machine-learning algorithms that can help restore motor function to people with spinal cord injuries via epidural spinal cord stimulation, and an effort to develop next-generation retinal prostheses to help people with visual impairments is underway as well. To learn more about our ongoing brain implant studies, please reference our clinical trial pages.
We are developing techniques to access the brain at high resolution in noninvasive and wearable form factors using advanced optical imaging techniques. Our team has developed a next-generation functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) system for sensing neural activity and fluid flow at higher resolution across the entire brain. APL’s fNIRS technology is enabling new discoveries about how fluid flows in the brain during sleep, a critical process for clearing byproducts from the brain. These fluid flows are thought to be disrupted those dealing with traumatic brain injury and other neurological diseases. We are also developing a more focal coherent optical technology for sensing the motion of small populations of neurons through the scalp and skull.
Neural interfaces can open new channels to the external world: sensory experiences can be augmented via brain stimulation, and neural sensing creates new methods to control devices. A team from the ISC is researching how these artificial channels interact with existing sensory and motor pathways in order to understand the additional capabilities enabled by neural interfaces, the limitations of those capabilities, and the overall ethical implications of neurotechnologies.
