Posts Tagged ‘brain-machine interfaces’
Silicon Chips Wired With Nerve Cells Could Enable New Brain/Machine Interfaces
A team there has found that mouse nerve cells will connect with each other across a network of tiny tubes threaded through a semiconductor material. It’s not exactly clear at this point how the nerve cells are functioning, but what is clear is that the cells seem to have an affinity for the tiny tubes, and that alone has some interesting implications.
To create the nerve-chip hybrid, the researchers created tubes of layered silicon and germanium that are large enough for the nerve cells’ tendrils to navigate but too small for the actual body of the cell to pass through. They then introduced nerve cells to the tubes and found that the cells will readily thread their tendrils through them--even through complex geometries like helical curves--to connect with each other physically.
What isn’t clear is whether or not the cells are actually communicating with each other they way they would naturally. Going forward, the team aims to get sensors into the chips to see exactly how they are interacting. But the fact that nerve cells will follow the tubes along a preset path designed by researchers belies thrilling prospects.
For instance, nerve-electronic hybrid chips would make great places to test neurological drugs or to study the way nerve cells afflicted with disorders like Parkinson’s communicate. But even more tantalizing is the idea of a nerve-computer interface that would enable the kind of Skywalker-esque control of artificial limbs that is the holy grail prosthetics research.
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New Brain-Machine Interface Taps Human Smarts to Enhance Computers’ Abilities, Instead of Vice Versa
The device, known as C3Vision (cortically coupled computer vision) taps into the fast processing power of the brain to help computer programs manage complex problem, particularly those posed by image recognition. An electroencephalogram (EEG) cap on the head of a human user is used to detect neurological signals in the brain. The computer then flashes images up on the screen at a rate of about ten per second. The conscious brain doesn’t even have time to adequately consider each image, but the subconscious is hard at work.
The system is great at working our problems that computer language has a problem tackling. For instance, it’s easy enough to search for a picture of a bicycle on the Web, but it’s far more difficult for a search engine like Google or Bing to search for something that looks “odd” or perhaps “silly.” The brain, however, can take these less-defined, more abstract qualifiers and very quickly assess whether or not an image fits the term.
The conscious brain doesn’t even have to get involved. The images flash too quickly for a person to rate his or her interest in each one, but the visual pathways in the brain move much more quickly. Machine-learning algorithms can quickly detect the neurological signals that represent the brain’s interest in a given image, and helps the computer to rank the images for interest. If the person sees something interesting or different, the computer knows it even if the person does not.
As such, the system has been used in tests to accurately scan satellite images for the presence of surface-to-air missiles faster than either a human or a machine could alone. Which accounts for DARPA’s interest in the technology; the DoD research arm has sunk $4.6 million into the development of the tech via a spinoff from the university. But the tech could also be used for a variety of other tasks that require the analysis of large volumes of visual data.
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Meet RatCar, a Japanese Robot Car Controlled By a Rat’s Brain
RatCar is a brain-machine interface that uses a rat’s brain signals to control a motorized robot. The rat hangs in the air, and the robot does what the rat’s limbs would do. It’s far from the only brain-robot locomotion contraption, but it’s arguably one of the strangest.
Osamu Fukayama and colleagues developed RatCar to study whether a small vehicle could be controlled by the brain signals that move rats’ limbs. Unlike less-invasive, , the system involves implanting tiny neural electrodes in a rat’s brain.
The rat is suspended from a small lightweight “neuro-robotic platform,” as IEEE Spectrum reports. The goal is to make the vehicle and the rat work together to move forward. Brain-control interfaces like this could be a boon for people with locked-in syndrome or various other disabilities.
The system also includes several models and algorithms that explain the correlation between recorded neural signals and the rat’s movement, as .
Researchers trained the rats by making them tow the car, motors turned off, around an enclosed area. A camera tracked the rats’ movement and fed data into a modeling program, which pieced together signals from the motor cortex. Then, the rats were hung from the car so their limbs barely touched the floor. The researchers switched the motors on, and as they tried to move, their neural signals were used to drive the car. Six out of eight rats adapted well and were able to get around with the car, according to IEEE Spectrum.
It’s not clear how much the rats’ wriggling might have affected the car’s movement, however. Fukayama and colleagues Takafumi Suzuki and Kunihiko Mabuchi want to perform more experiments to address that question.
They have been working on RatCar for several years and presented their most recent work last month at the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society annual conference in Buenos Aires.
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EEG Monitoring Headband Could Track and Catalog Your Emotional Response to Movies
Films could be indexed by the emotional responses they elicit
In the video below, Robert Oschler of Android Review demonstrates EmoRate, a software program that catalogs his emotions. It captures his reactions to the "Sintel" trailer, from the project.
EmoRate uses the Emotiv 14-electrode mind-reading headset, which wirelessly connects to a computer. The EEG reads and tracks your facial expressions, which allows it to track your emotions. This allows the computer to respond to your emotions and lets you affect the computer's actions.
The computer tracks four primary emotions -- happiness, sadness, anger and fear -- and catalogs when they occur. The catalog acts as a "silicon extension" of memory.
Once the catalog is built, you can search by emotion. Like a Mr. Skin for fear, the program will tell you precisely when a fear-inducing scene appears on screen.
The best part: You can search for scenes by emotion, just by remembering the scene and the emotion it conjured.
As Oschler explains, he recalls a fearsome scene in the trailer when a baby dragon is snatched away from the heroine. As he thinks about the moment, the fear meter rises, and the computer searches the catalog for fear-inducing scenes.
Watch the video:
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