Cathy, who was completely paralysed by a stroke 15 years ago, thought about having a drink of coffee. A robotic arm responded by moving her drinking bottle from a nearby table up to her mouth so she could sip through the straw.
The remarkable experiment in brain technology was the first time since the stroke that 58-year-old Cathy had drunk without help from a carer. “The smile on her face was a remarkable thing to see,” said Leigh Hochberg, a professor of neuro-engineering at Brown University in Rhode Island.
Cathy was one of two tetraplegic patients taking part in a clinical trial of the BrainGate brain-computer interface developed at Brown.