The National Center for Adaptative Neurotechnologies (NCAN) located on New Scotland Avenue in Albany, New York, are building an infrastructure that supports real-time interactions with the central nervous system (CNS) helping to restore a skill such as locomotion.

"Progress in medical science now enables people with severe paralysis to live for many years. Many of these individuals have great difficulty in communicating. Some may even be entirely "locked in" to their bodies: their minds are functioning, but they cannot move a single muscle to communicate in any way. The capacity for simple communication could greatly improve the quality of their lives. The Center for Adaptive Neurotechnologies has addressed this problem by developing a new generation of brain-based communication devices (BCI) that can provide communication and control functions to people who have lost muscle control. By recording brain waves from the scalp and then decoding them, this system allows people to move a computer cursor up/down and left/right, to spell words, and to perform other simple control functions."

The research areas are divided by Guiding Beneficial Plasticity, Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) Based Rehabilitation and Characterizing and Interacting with Cortical Processes. During 2015 some papers have been published in peer-reviewed neuroscientic, neuroengineering and clinical journals related to this subjects:

• Cortical alpha activity predicts the confidence in an impending action;
• Brain-to-text: Decoding spoken sentences from phone representations (...);
• A general framework for dynamic cortical function:ons (FBO) hypothesis;
• The Plurality of Human Brain-Computer Interfacing;
• Electrocorticographic activity over sensorimotor cortex and motor function (...);
• Restoring walking after spinal cord injury (...);
• Word-level language for P300 spellers based on discriminative graphical models;
• NeuralAct: A Tool to Visualize Electrocortical (ECoG) Activity on a 3D Model (...);
• Targeted neuroplasticity for rehabilitation;
• Toward independent home use of BCIs: a decision algorithm (...);
• Electrocorticographic representations of segmental features in continuous speech.

For more informations about NCAN press here.