Rewiring lives (book excerpt: Shattered Nerves)

New medical devices are offering hope for patients to hear, see and move their limbs. New York science and technology writer Victor D. Chase tells how.

By Victor D. Chase, AMNews contributor. Feb. 12, 2007.

Book Excerpt
A peek inside what's new on the shelves on topics pertinent to physicians.

This excerpt shows how one system might help some people with disabilities operate a computer through brain waves.

Scott Hamel is an automotive teaching assistant, who at 140 pounds held the bench press record for his weight class in New York state at one time by lifting almost twice his weight. Hamel also drives drag racers and owns his own drag race team. And he is a paraplegic, paralyzed in an automobile accident in 1977, when he was a junior in high school. But is he concerned about the danger involved in barreling down a drag strip at 200 miles per hour? ''I never give it a thought,'' Hamel said. One thing he gives a lot of thought to, however, is operating a computer, which is something he does regularly, using his thoughts and nothing else.

On a bright, warm summer day, Hamel sits alone in his wheelchair in a darkened room in the massive Empire State Plaza in Albany, where the business of New York state is conducted and where the offices and laboratories of the State Health Dept. are located. He is wearing a bright red cloth hat, looking much like a shower cap, chin strap and all, except that it includes 64 small, white round dots symmetrically spaced across its surface, each representing an electrode that contacts the outside of his skull. Wires from the electrodes merge into a flat cable that leads to a computer on a table behind Hamel. Not moving a muscle, he is totally engrossed in the image on the monitor five feet in front of him as it responds to his thoughts, which are focused on moving the computer's cursor to a red oblong box that has just popped up in one corner of the screen. The other corners are populated by green boxes. It is Hamel's task to think the cursor to the red box, which requires moving the cursor up and down and side to side. When he successfully makes contact, the red box turns yellow and a new set of boxes appears. Where the red box will show up is arbitrary and differs each time the image changes. The faster he hits the target, the faster the screen configuration changes. If he does not reach the red target after a few seconds, the screen goes blank and a new set of targets appears. During the first of a series of three-minute sessions, Hamel hits 20 out of 27 red targets. His score is similar for the other six sessions.