Anyone here with experience in neural prosthetics?

I have heard about monkeys controling robotic arms and such, but how difficult is it to interpret signals going down the spinal cord?
Anyone have a rough estimate how many nervecells the its made up of?

Ive seen research making nerveendings grow into computerchips and succesfully decode neuron firing, but to do this on hundreds of thousands (millions?)of neurons seems to some distance into the future. Not to mention the hardware recuired to process all that information realtime.

Any thoughts?

NovaSol, a research company in Hawaii is doing brain-machine interface research.



Go to their neural imaging page for details. The company's president, Dr. Hunter Downs, will respond to emails from the interested.

That part of NovaSol has now spun off into it's own company called URL=http://www.archinoetics.com]Archinoetics, LLC[/URL], and is run by Dr. Traci Downs. We're still doing brain machine interface and a whole lot more.

Correcting that link:

Archinoetics, LLC

Interesting company indeed.