Smart chip by Indian-origin scientist may help combat Parkinson's disease!

Singapore: Scientists, including one of Indian-origin, have developed a smart chip that can be implanted in the brain and send signals wirelessly to implants and prosthetics.

The low-power microchip developed by scientists at Nanyang Technological University may help combat Parkinson's disease or allow paraplegic people to move their prosthetic limbs.

"It is about a hundred times more efficient than current processing chips on the market. It will lead to more compact medical wearable devices, such as portable ECG monitoring devices and neural implants, since we no longer need large batteries to power them," said Arindam Basu, assistant professor from NTU's School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering.

The research team have tested the chip on data recorded from animal models, which showed that it could decode the brain's signal to the hand and fingers with 95 percent accuracy.

The new chip can allow the transmission of brain data wirelessly and with high accuracy.

The findings were published last month in the prestigious journal, IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Circuits & Systems.