Technology Gives Paraplegics New Freedom

STOUGHTON, Mass., April 20, 2005 — -- For three years, Matt Nagle has been a prisoner in his wheelchair, paralyzed from the neck down after a stabbing.

But today, he can move an artificial hand, control the cursor on a computer screen and play a game of video pong.

He is doing it all through the power of his mind.

Researchers at Cyberkinetics Inc., a firm in Foxborough, have figured out how to read the tiny electrical signals from the human brain, and run them through a computer to turn them into useful commands.

"If I want to open the hand, I just imagine moving the cursor, going up," said Nagle, "and if I want to close the hand, I imagine moving the cursor down."

Nagle, age 25, lives at an extended-care facility a few miles from Cyberkinetics' offices. He is the first of five quadriplegics taking part in a study of the new technology.

A tiny electrode -- smaller than President Lincoln's face on a penny -- is inserted through the skull and implanted on the surface of the brain, right in the area that controls the movement of one's arms. Its signals are then filtered by computer.

"These look like complex patterns of activity," said John Donoghue, co-founder of Cyberkinetics, "but we can interpret them or decode them into a signal that is actually representing, 'I want to go left. I want to go right. I want to move quickly. I want to move slowly.' "

The researchers say they still have a lot of work to do; they need to try their system on more volunteers.

But if everything works, they say the technology has multiple uses for giving a paralyzed person more freedom.

It is the first freedom Nagle has gained since that stabbing in 2001. He had the surgery to implant the chip last June.

"I've been like this for three and a half years," Nagle said, "and for the first two years, I had no faith. I had no faith, I had no hope."

Now, he says, all that has changed.