Kevin describes the process of having implants inserted and how they work

This is a picture of my left arm, ah during the operation. It looks a lot healthier now and what they had to do was to make two incisions and to put a tube down between the incisions. That array of 100 electrodes, ah, was then pushed down the tube, ah then they remove the tube and this is what it looked like at the end of the operation. The white gauze over my wrist, that’s where the implant was actually in my nervous system. There were then wires running up my arm and hopefully you can see a little green connector up towards my elbow, that had gold connectors on it and those gold connectors were effectively bringing my nervous system out of my body. That’s a direct electrical connection with my nervous system. Now that meant I couldn’t have a bath for the three months that this was in place, and in the shower I had to keep my arm out of the way because if we’d got water on the terminals it would have short circuited my nervous system.

Ah, here we’ve got wires directly connecting the terminals outside my arm to the computer so my nervous system now is connected directly into the computer so when I move my hand, hopefully you can see here there are two types of signals; um, the general squiggly ones I’m not too bothered about but there are two signals that start around the zero point on the left hand side. They then go downwards below the bottom line. They move down. They then go up and then settle down in the middle. What those are, are neural signals. These are signals that when I move my fingers, my brain sending these signals down my nervous system to move my fingers. These were the signals we wanted to pick up. So we were picking up these neural signals. Send them to the computer. From the computer we could send them out, for example, to this robot hand. So when I moved my hand my neural signals were sent by the computer to also operate the robot hand.