Paralysed Dutchman walks in giant step forward for mind-reading AI

Gert-Jan Oskam is the first person with a severe spinal injury to test an AI system that reads his thoughts and beams messages to his legs.

Gert-Jan Oskam tests the system at Lausanne University Hospital. Picture: EPFL/Jimmy Ravier.

More than a decade after an accident left him paralysed, the adult patient rose to his feet like an ­unsteady toddler.

Within hours he had taken his first tentative steps – thanks to a device that not very long ago would have seemed like something plucked from the realms of science fiction.

Gert-Jan Oskam, 40, is the first person with a severe spinal injury to test an AI system that reads his thoughts and beams wireless messages to his legs, impelling them to move according to his wishes.

He can now walk for a couple of hundred metres in one go, using sticks to support himself. “It has been a long journey, but now I can stand up and have a beer with my friend,” he said. Being able to stand and chat at a bar was, he added, a simple pleasure that too many of us took for granted.

Oskam was paralysed from the waist down 12 years ago, after severing his spinal cord in a ­motorbike accident in China. Doctors in The Netherlands, where he lives, told him that he should not expect to walk again.

Refusing to accept their prognosis, Oskam sought out a pioneering team of scientists and neurosurgeons based in Switzerland who are using AI to treat paraplegics. They performed two operations.

First, they installed an array of electrodes in his lower back, next to his spinal column, the bundle of nerve fibres that should carry messages from the brain to the legs, but which had been severed at the neck by his accident.

The second procedure implanted a set of electrodes in his skull, over the region of the brain that issues the instructions for us to move our legs. The information that these skull electrodes gather is beamed to AI that has been trained to decipher which muscles he is attempting to move.

The AI, which operates from a computer carried in a backpack, then sends a signal, wirelessly, to the electrodes in his lower back. These target precise areas of his spinal cord. When different strands of nerve fibre are stimulated, different muscles flex.

The researchers behind the technology describe it as creating a “digital bridge” that spans the broken section of his spine.

“We’ve captured the thoughts of Gert-Jan, and translated these thoughts into a stimulation of the spinal cord to re-establish voluntary movement,” said professor Gregoire Courtine of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne.

The technology has remained “reliable and stable” for more than a year and Oskam has used it at home without supervision, the researchers said. It also appears to have promoted a partial repair of the damage done to his spinal cord and he has regained the ­ability to walk with crutches even when the system is switched off.

“That is something completely new. The growth of new nerve connections – we haven’t seen this before,” Courtine said.

His team has made a series of breakthroughs in recent years. A previous version of the technology required the user to press a button on a tablet device. This caused a preprogrammed ­sequence of messages to be sent to the nerves controlling the legs. It allowed three men with complete spinal cord injury to make movements including walking, cycling and swimming.

The new study represents a big upgrade. There is no preprogrammed sequence of messages; instead the brain is continuously in contact with the required nerves and muscles. Oskam, who had also tried an earlier model, explained that the refined version gave him far more control of his movements.

“Before, the stimulation was controlling me; now I am controlling the stimulation using my thoughts. I think that’s the big difference,” he said.

Courtine said that his team were reaching the point where the technology would be able to read a person’s brain activity and target certain groups of nerve cells very precisely. In a sense, they were able to have a “conversation” with the spinal cord, he said. This means that bladder control and sexual function might also be restored.

“Because we have this understanding of how and where to apply stimulation, we can start targeting other neurological functions that are important.

“Paralysis is just the tip of the iceberg,” Courtine said.

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