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Posted on Sep 22, 2002, 11 a.m.
By Bill Freeman
Advances in biomedical engineering should soon be giving paralysed patients a new lease of life by restoring at least some of their mobility, according to Dr William Craelius, an associate professor of biomechanical engineering at Rutgers University. While science fiction's vision of bionic men is still some way off, scientists are apparently getting closer and closer to using machines to carry out human functions.
Advances in biomedical engineering should soon be giving paralysed patients a new lease of life by restoring at least some of their mobility, according to Dr William Craelius, an associate professor of biomechanical engineering at Rutgers University. While science fiction's vision of bionic men is still some way off, scientists are apparently getting closer and closer to using machines to carry out human functions. One hot area of research are brain-machine interfaces, where a computer attempts to interpret commands from the brain and turn them into a controlled response using a computer controlled robot. One study using such technology enabled severely paralyzed patients, who are even unable to blink, to select letters on a computer screen. Many experts agree that the biggest problem with the science of bionics is that currently available hardware is too big to fit inside the brain. However Craelius believes that chips could be small enough within 5-years if Moore's law, which maintains that the number of transistors on a computer chip will double every 18 months, remains true for bionics.
SOURCE/REFERENCE: Science 2002; 295:1018-1021
