Fuck yeah!
I know it’s a small start- but it’s progress into the unknown, and that’s always pretty cool.
I suppose they’re not running feedback from the hand back to his brain, right? So he’s relying on visual confirmation of what he’s doing without being able to “feel” it, right?
Still. Pretty freaking awesome.
This is the future. I wonder if it would help to have a record of brain activity prior to the injury, like, could you go in to a lab and have all of the relevant input output patterns mapped for the various muscles and tendons in your body in case of a future injury?
I suppose this would help with feedback like touch and pain as well.
Obviously it’s early days yet. The idea of just routing around damaged nerves seems like it has a lot of potential. And I guess with liberal application of signal theory, you could modulate those signals in healthy people as well. I imagine the military would like to be able to turn down pain or increase kinaesthetic ability at a whim.
Not exactly as I had imagined but…
By delivering electrical currents—which can block pain signals at the spinal cord level—into a deep, middle brain structure, it might be possible to treat chronic pain without the intervention of drugs. At the same time, the technique can spur the release of dopamine, which helps with the emotional distress typically associated with long-term pain.
Great news, hopefully it is just the start of full-body mobility for people with that kind of injury. I just hope he has a good IT security guy so hackers can’t hijack his limbs. (That’s GOT to be a sci-fi setup for an existing short story somewhere, right?)
I read that as “chimp.”
So did I. Like every time I see this headline in the feed. 
I think quadriplegics considering exercising a “Right to Die” should have some second thoughts.
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