Meet Benjamin Choi, 17-year-old who built a $300 mind-controlled prosthetic arm that reads brainwaves through non-invasive electrodes

Each one of us spent the pandemic doing something that we normally wouldn't have the time to. While some picked up numerous indoor hobbies, others studied hard enough to change career pathways. Benjamin Choi, a then 17-year-old kid, put his spare time during the phase to design an accessible device that does not require brain surgery.When he was in third grade, Choi watched a "60 Minutes" documentary about a mind-controlled prosthesis. Researchers implanted tiny sensors into the motor cortex of the brain of a patient who moved a robotic arm using her thoughts. “I was really, really amazed at the time because this technology was so impressive,” he said to Smithsonian Magazine. “But I was also alarmed that they require this really risky open brain surgery. And they're so inaccessible, costing in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.”Years later, when the pandemic hit in 2020, Choi, a tenth grader living in Virginia found himself with ample free time. The lab in which he’d planned to spend his summer researching aluminium fuels had shut down. But the documentary he had seen years earlier stuck with him, and he decided to use his spare time to build a less-invasive prosthetic arm himse...