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Swiss scientists demonstrate mind-controlled robot

LAUSANNE, Switzerland (AP) -- Swiss scientists have demonstrated how a partially paralyzed person can control a robot by thought alone, a step they hope will one day allow immobile people to interact with their surroundings through so-called avatars.Similar experiments have taken place in the United States and Germany, but they involved either able-bodied patients or invasive brain implants.On Tuesday, a team at Switzerland's Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne used only a simple head cap to record the brain signals of Mark-Andre Duc, who was at a hospital in the southern Swiss town of Sion 100 kilometers (62 miles) away.Duc's thoughts - or rather, the electrical signals emitted by his brain when he imagined lifting his paralyzed fingers - were decoded almost instantly by a laptop at the hospital. The resulting instructions - left or right - were then transmitted to a foot-tall robot scooting around the Lausanne lab.Duc lost control of his legs and fingers in a fall and is now considered partially quadriplegic. He said controlling the robot wasn't hard on a good day.\But when I'm in pain it becomes more difficult