The intended clinical goal is to improve motor function in individuals with spinal cord injuries and hemiplegia. Postmortem dissection after 2 weeks in 1 cat showed that most wire tips were in the ventral horn.
Some electrodes continue to activate single muscles selectively after several months.
Clinically, the results suggest that weak voluntary activations of different muscle groups could be boosted non-selectively by stimulating through single implanted electrodes. This could be useful for retraining of voluntary muscle control. The novel approach of stimulating several muscles by tapping into their control centers in the spinal cord could diminish several of the problems associated with stimulating muscles in the periphery. Conducting further experiments in the unanesthetized spinal cord of acute spinalized animals and in long-term implants in normal animals will provide more insight into the feasibility of this approach.