Researchers restore injured man's sense of touch using brain-computer interface technology

"We're taking subperceptual touch events and boosting them into conscious perception," says first author Patrick Ganzer, a principal research scientist at Battelle. "When we did this, we saw several functional improvements. It was a big eureka moment when we first restored the participant's sense of touch." The participant in this study is Ian Burkhart, a 28-year-old man who suffered a spinal cord injury during a diving accident in 2010. Since 2014, Burkhart has been working with investigators on a project called NeuroLife that aims to restore function to his right arm. The device they have developed works through a system of electrodes on his skin and a small computer chip implanted in his motor cortex.