By Birgit Buerkner
Operate machines and computers with mere thoughts or move the fingers of a prosthetic hand. What sounds like a vision of the future has long since been made practical by a Charité scientist.
dr Surjo Soekadar (45), neuroscientist and psychiatrist, converts his patients’ brain signals into control signals. The result: paralyzed people can do everyday activities again, such as grabbing a cup or typing on a cell phone!
Example Annette Dreher: The stroke patient was completely paralyzed. Soekadar put a hood with electrodes on her and strapped on a hand prosthesis connected to it, a so-called exoskeleton.
If the patient thinks “Grab the toothbrush!”, then the hand prosthesis does the same Photo: Federal Press Office
The electrodes measure the electrical and magnetic activity of the brain on the surface of the head. This is translated into control signals for the exoskeleton. “I had to think: open your hand,” says Dreher and laughs. “I thought it and the hand did it. That is really indescribable.”
Annette Dreher can do gardening again with the exoskeleton Photo: Federal Press Office
Even more stunning is the long-term effect. “Stroke patients who trained their hands with the exoskeleton every day were soon able to take it off,” says Soekadar. “The nerve cells were activated. This led to a change and reorganization of the brain.”
Some of those who had been paralyzed for decades were able to move, open and close their hands again.
The signal transmission at the human-computer interface also works the other way around, which benefits patients with therapy-resistant depression, for example.
Psychiatrist Soekadar treats a depressed patient with magnetic impulses Photo: Stefanie Herbst
In the Charité Clinic for Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, a magnetic field is built up over your head during what is known as repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation. In the three to nine-minute treatment, 1800 magnetic impulses are emitted. “Brain activity changes as a result of the stimulation,” says Soekadar. “We can relieve symptoms.”
A treated patient: “I haven’t lived for a year, now I’m alive again. I feel like I’ve never been sick.”