Paralyzed man flies virtual drone by thought alone

By Trevor Mogg Published January 21, 2025

A man with paralysis has been able to fly a virtual drone using only his thoughts.

The feat was made possible by a brain-computer interface (BCI) that decoded the man’s brain activity in real time, Nature reported this week. The neural signals were associated with finger movements that enabled control of the virtual drone.

“There’s a lot of things that we enjoy or do as humans where we use multiple individuated finger movements, so like typing, sewing, playing a musical instrument,” said Matthew Willsey, the study’s co-author and a neurosurgeon at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. “That’s what this line of work is focused on — how we enable the control of multiple things at the same time.”

Willsey added that the experiment could’ve been performed with a real drone but the team decided to use a virtual one for ease and safety.

The 69-year-old man who participated in the study told the researchers that controlling the virtual object felt like playing a musical instrument, saying: “Flying [the virtual drone] is tiny little finesses off a middle line, a little bit up, a little bit down.”

The man’s BCI was fitted by Blackrock Neurotech and was implanted in the area of the brain that controls hand motion.

An AI model was used to map the neural signals received by the BCI’s electrodes to the man’s thoughts, New Scientist explained. The participant first went through a process of learning how to imagine some of his fingers moving in a way that created electrical signals of varying strength, which later allowed him to pilot the virtual drone through an obstacle course.

Willsey said that for the participant, the test was the realization of “a dream that he thought was lost once he suffered his injury. He had a passion and a dream for flying. He seemed very empowered and enabled — he would have us take videos and send it to friends.”

BCI technology has made significant advancements in recent years, with companies like Elon Musk’s Neuralink also developing a device that is currently undergoing human testing.

Once fully developed, a slew of exciting applications could bring significant freedom and independence to those with paralysis.

They include allowing people with severe paralysis or locked-in syndrome to communicate by translating neural activity into text or speech simply through their thoughts. It can also enable people to use computers, play games, and operate wheelchairs and robotic prosthetics, and even do things like grasp objects or scratch their face.

However, challenges remain with the technology, including medical risks from the surgery required to implant a BCI device.

High levels of concentration are also required from the person using the device, with current BCIs correctly recognizing mental commands only about 80% of the time, and up to 30% of users failing to get it to function at all. The health and psychological implications of the technology, including cognitive fatigue and long-term exposure to electromagnetic fields, are also not yet fully understood.

These and other challenges highlight the need for continued research and development to improve BCI technology, deal with safety concerns, and create appropriate regulatory frameworks.