UC San Francisco develops brain implant that detects footsteps and reduces falls in Parkinson's patients

The swing of a leg lasts less than half a second. In that sliver of time, the foot leaves the ground, travels forward, and lands again, and the brain has to orchestrate the whole thing while keeping the body upright.

For people with Parkinson's disease, that orchestration falters. Steps shorten, lurch, lose their symmetry, and then someone falls.

A team at the University of California, San Francisco has now built a brain stimulator that catches each of those moments as it happens.

Implanted deep in the brain, the device reads the neural signature of a single step and adjusts its output with each stride.