Tech Briefs Magazine - March 2023 - 45

SPINOFF
N
ASA asks hard questions: What's it
like on the Moon? Has there been
life on Mars? How did the first stars form?
Finding these big answers often means
first solving a series of smaller but equally
vexing questions. For example, how
does prolonged weightlessness change
the way the brain controls muscles? How
does the brain control muscles? Before
sending humans on the long journey to
Mars, NASA wants to better understand
the effects the trip will have on astronauts.
Now a company that helped the
space agency try to solve these questions
is helping others find answers as exciting
as any NASA discovery.
Researchers using systems created by
Delsys Inc. of Natick, MA, are now working
to help paralyzed people walk again,
to let amputees control prosthetic limbs
like any normal body part, and to allow
laryngectomy patients to speak. Such
projects are only conceivable, however,
because of decades of research and development,
jump-started by several early
NASA partnerships.
Delsys was founded in 1993 by Carlo
De Luca, Founding Director of Boston
University's Neuromuscular Research
Center (NMRC), to begin commercializing
technology the center was developing.
At the heart of the NMRC's mission
to improve understanding of motor control
was advanced electromyographic
(EMG) technology, which senses and analyzes
the electrical signals emitted when
motor nerves carrying signals from the
brain and spinal cord stimulate muscles.
De Luca and his team had already
been pioneering early-stage EMG technology
prior to opening the NMRC in
1984, and the new center's work quickly
drew NASA's interest.
In the late 1980s and 1990s the agency's
Johnson Space Center in Houston
helped fund studies in which the NMRC
and then Delsys tested muscle fatigue resulting
from the use of different spacesuit
glove designs, as well as astronauts'
balance and neuromuscular adaptability
Tech Briefs, March 2023
Spinoff is NASA's annual publication featuring
successfully commercialized NASA technology. This
commercialization has contributed to the development
of products and services in the fields of health and
medicine, consumer goods, transportation, public safety,
computer technology, and environmental resources.
Sensors Read Minds and Restore Movement
Resulting in applications once thought impossible, technology for understanding mind-body
interface builds on NASA's research for space travel.
The Delsys Trigno Maize sensor is capable of
high-density electromyographic (EMG) signal
detection to let the operator understand musculature
and muscle control in high definition.
(Image: Delsys Inc.)
before and after space shuttle flights. By
2000, two Small Business Innovation Research
(SBIR) contracts from Johnson
helped Delsys complete its first commercial
EMG system, called the MyoMonitor.
Testing on astronauts provided a valuable
opportunity for the team to study
neuromuscular adaptation to the absence
of gravity, said Serge Roy, who
worked with De Luca since the late 1970s
and is now Director of Research at Delsys
and its research arm, Altec Inc. Previously,
the team had tried to simulate weightlessness
in laboratory rats. But the NASA
work also raised new questions, he said:
" The amount of weakness you see after
two weeks of spaceflight can't be fully accounted
for by the degree of atrophy in
the muscle. "
The early 2000s brought another
round of technology development and
space shuttle studies to examine the
functioning of astronauts' individual
motor nerves. " That triggered a larger
evolution of technology, which has been
a mainstay of our research and our product
line ever since, " said Gianluca De
Luca, Carlo's second cousin, who became
President of Delsys following the
elder De Luca's death in 2016.
To pick up individual motor nerve signals,
the team had to insert needles with
electronic sensors into astronauts' hands
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Researchers are using neural interfaces with
Delsys Trigno Mini sensors to work on letting
patients control state-of-the-art prosthetics
such as Össur's i-Limb Quantum, shown here.
(Image: Delsys Inc.)
Delsys and its customers are working to fuse
EMG signals and movement information from
arms and hands with virtual or augmented reality
experiences for telehealth applications.
(Image: Delsys Inc.)
and legs. But Delsys wanted to improve
its technology to allow this level of precision
from sensors attached to the skin,
and to make those sensors wireless.
These two major challenges were overcome
with the help of two more SBIR
contracts from Johnson.
Gianluca De Luca compared picking
out individual nerve signals from the
surface of the skin to mapping raindrops
falling on a pond during a downpour,
based on their ripples. " If I were to ask
you to identify the individual raindrops
that led to that pattern of ripples, you
wouldn't be able to do it. " With the SBIR
funding, the company designed sensors
45
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Tech Briefs Magazine - March 2023

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