Professors Aaron Baker and Chong Xie are creating advanced neural interfaces to help patients with peripheral nerve injury or amputated limbs.
Researchers in The University of Texas at Austin’s Department of Biomedical Engineering are creating advanced neural interfaces to help patients with peripheral nerve injury or amputated limbs.
With a $1.5 million grant from the Department of Defense, Aaron Baker, associate professor, and Chong Xie, assistant professor, are collaborating to create regenerative, ultra-compliant electrodes to create stable interfaces with the nervous system. The technology will use regenerative gels printed on flexible electronic devices to enable integrations with the nervous system and, in the long-term, help patients with nerve injury, paralysis, and amputation.
The project will combine tissue engineering techniques from Dr. Baker’s group and nanobioelectronic techniques from Dr. Xie’s group. Together the researchers will create extremely flexible electrodes designed to interact closely with the nervous system.
Ultimately, this technology may be used to restore function to patients with nerve damage and allow neural control of artificial limbs for amputees.
