(ABC News) Four years after Ian Burkhart became a quadriplegic during a diving accident, he moved his fingers just by thinking about it.
He did it with the help of an experimental device that bypassed his damaged spinal cord to transmit messages from his brain to his hand.
"It's much like a heart bypass, but instead of bypassing blood, we're actually bypassing electrical signals," said Chad Bouton, research leader at Battelle, an Ohio nonprofit research organization that developed the equipment. "We're taking those signals from the brain, going around the injury, and actually going directly to the muscles."