A Bendable Implant Taps the Nervous System without Damaging It

January 8, 2015

(MIT Technology Review) – Medicine these days entertains all kinds of ambitious plans for reading off brain signals to control wheelchairs, or using electronics to bypass spinal injuries. But most of these ideas for implants that can interface with the nervous system run up against a basic materials problem: wires are stiff and bodies are soft. That motivated some researchers at the École Polytechnique Fédérale, in Lausanne, Switzerland, to design a soft, flexible electronic implant, which they say has the same ability to bend and stretch as dura mater, the membrane that surrounds the brain and spinal cord.