Grants put U. scientists closer to electrode 'miracle' zone

University of Utah bioengineering and medical researchers plan to use four grants totaling nearly $7 million to develop wireless electrodes that could help blind people "see," those who are paralyzed stand and perhaps even walk, and give new voice to those who have lost theirs.

At the core of their efforts is the Utah Electrode Array, an implantable device smaller than a penny that contains 100 needle-shaped electrodes, each of which can talk simultaneously to many individual neurons on the brain. Each of the four grants just awarded by the National Institutes of Health to U. researchers would use in some way that array, which was developed by Richard Normann, a professor of bioengineering and ophthalmology, in 1989.

The first grant, worth $2.816 million over four years, will be used by Florian Solzbacher and Reid Harrison, both assistant professors of electrical and computer engineering, and Normann to develop a wireless version of the Utah Electrode Array.

"Whenever the array is used," Normann said, "it has to be, unfortunately, implanted in tissues with wires that come out and across the skin, so there's potential for infection."

The researchers plan to use sophisticated circuit development to incorporate wireless capabilities so the electrode array could be implanted in the brain or peripheral nervous system and be entirely contained there but capable of "talking" wirelessly to other technology. Creating a wireless array will further "open the door to human applications," he said, and speed their development.

For more than a decade, Normann has been toiling with other researchers to develop the array that could be implanted into the brains of blind people, connected to a tiny camera that would gather visual information and feed it back to the electrodes in the brain's visual cortex, allowing them to process the artificial vision.

Having a wireless form of the Utah Electrode Array would make such a system more wearable and user-friendly for people who are blind, Normann said.

The electrode array has also been used for many years not just in the brain but in the peripheral parts of the body, too, Normann said. Working with animals, the researchers have been able to use the array to stimulate the nerves that go to the muscles. And some of the grant funding will be used to further that effort.