Some will say that experience is the best teacher. And for people like Hugh Herr, this opinion is indeed axiomatic. Being a disabled person without legs, he was in dire need of adequate prostheses, but in the end, not finding them, decided to develop their own. Who would have thought that what creates Herr, over time, acquire the status of the world's most advanced bionic technology.

Now a researcher and expert in bionics is the co-founder of the Center for extreme bionics at the Massachusetts Institute of technology (MIT) is a unique research laboratory which began to implement the ideas of the withdrawal of bionics at a whole new level.

Since its founding in 2014 its key objective is to solve the problems of a wide range of physical limitations people through the development of advanced bionics. Currently, the center received a grant in the amount of $ 100 million and started a five year project. The main areas are the treatment of paralysis, depression, epilepsy, Parkinson's disease, restoration of function in people with amputation of limbs by bionic technology.

simply put, the center is engaged exclusively in the development of advanced technologies.

Despite the fact that modern prostheses are able to be really useful and can give the amputee opportunity to recover some of the lost motor functions, according to Guerra and his colleagues, they can improve these devices by combining them with advanced neural implants. The benefits of this will be that the prosthesis will be able to directly communicate with nerve endings and muscles that will make their management much more simple and actually turns them into bionic the continuation of the human body.

However, the team from MIT believes that neural implants can have unlimited potential, far beyond the regular prosthesis. For example, the technology can be used as an alternative center of brain function and used for the treatment of neurological and mental diseases.
The Researchers also see great potential in optogenetics and the development of digital nervous system that will be able to replace biological and helps in curing paralysis and Parkinson's disease. In addition, scientists believe that it will be able to develop cells and tissues on the basis of which it will be possible to grow organs to restore or replace biological structures.

According to statistics from the world health organization, have 40-80 people per million manifest cases of paralysis, but this is only one of the issues around which the focus of the Center for extreme bionics. If center staff will be able to find ways of using this technology to help all these people, the dream of Herr about the world in which disability does not exist in principle, can become a reality.

Source: scienews.com