Noninvasive Brain Machine Interface Demonstrated for Bionic Hand

A team of researchers from the University of Houston (UH) has developed an algorithm that enabled a man whose right hand had been amputated to grasp objects using a bionic hand controlled by his thoughts. While we've seen similar accomplishments in recent years, the new technique is non-invasive, capturing brain activity via a scalp EEG.

Research developments in recent years have given amputees much cause for hope with various thought-controlled prosthetic devices. Some have relied on surgically implanted electrodes, while others make use of electrical signals from muscles (known as myoelectric control).

But Jose Luis Contreras-Vidal, a neuroscientist and engineer at UH points out that such methods have their disadvantages. Surgery, particularly neurosurgery, is a risky business, while myoelectric systems require the brain activity from muscles related to the missing limb still be intact.

In an effort to avoid these problems, UH researchers attached electrodes of a 64-channel active EEG (electroencephalogram) to the scalps of five able-bodied, right-handed men and women in their 20s. These volunteers were then tasked with picking up five different objects – a soda can, a compact disc, a credit card, a small coin and a screwdriver – each intended to illustrate a different type of grasp. The data collected data was then used to create software to decode neural activity into motor signals that reconstructed the grasping movements.

The scalp EEG was then fitted to a 56-year-old man whose right hand had been amputated and a high-tech bionic hand fitted to the remaining stump. After being told to observe and visualize himself controlling the hand, he was able to grasp the various objects using his thoughts with an 80 percent success rate.

Contreras-Vidal says a delay of 50 to 90 milliseconds between the time the signals were recorded by the EEG and when the bionic hand began to grasp indicated that the brain predicted the movement, rather than reflected it.

The researchers claim this is the first time grasping has been demonstrated using EEG-based brain-machine interface (BMI) control of a multi-fingered prosthetic hand, with Contreras-Vidal saying it could lead to the development of better prosthetic devices.

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Jan Scheuermann is the new Clint Eastwood, Becomes First Person to fly F-35 Simulator With Just her Mind

Jan Scheuermann, a quadriplegic and the pioneering patient for an experimental Pentagon robotics program, continues to break ground in freeing the mind from the limitations of the body.

The 55-year-old mother of two in 2012 agreed to let surgeons implant electrodes on her brain to control a robotic arm. More recently, she flew an F-35 Joint Strike Fighter simulator using nothing but her thoughts, an official said.

Arati Prabhakar, director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, cited the breakthrough last week at the first annual Future of War conference. The event was organized by the New America Foundation, a nonpartisan research group in Washington, D.C.

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Brain to Brain Communication is Here

Steps to Brain Upgrade Implants

In a study in the journal Neuron, scientists describe a new high data-rate, low-power wireless brain sensor. The technology is designed to enable neuroscience research that cannot be accomplished with current sensors that tether subjects with cabled connections.

Experiments in the paper confirm that new capability. The results show that the technology transmitted rich, neuroscientifically meaningful signals from animal models as they slept and woke or exercised.

"We view this as a platform device for tapping into the richness of electrical signals from the brain among animal models where their neural circuit activity reflects entirely volitional and naturalistic behavior, not constrained to particular space," said Arto Nurmikko, professor of engineering affiliated with the Brown Institute for Brain Science and the paper's senior and corresponding author. "This enables new types of neuroscience experiments with vast amounts of brain data wirelessly and continuously streamed from brain microcircuits."

The custom-engineered neuroelectronic platform is composed of two elements: a 100-channel transmitter only 5 centimeters in its largest dimension and weighing only 46.1 grams, and a four-antenna receiver that looks like a home Wi-Fi router but employs sophisticated signal processing to maximize the transmitter's signal while the subject is moving around. Via a small port embedded in a subject's skull, the transmitter connects to a tiny implanted electrode array that detects the activity of scores of neurons in the cortex. The wireless transmitter is compatible with multiple types and classes of brain sensors, Nurmikko said, with a view toward future sensor development

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A Direct Brain-to-Brain Interface in Humans

A Direct Brain-to-Brain Interface in Humans

Authors:

Rao et al

Abstract:

We describe the first direct brain-to-brain interface in humans and present results from experiments involving six different subjects. Our non-invasive interface, demonstrated originally in August 2013, combines electroencephalography (EEG) for recording brain signals with transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) for delivering information to the brain. We illustrate our method using a visuomotor task in which two humans must cooperate through direct brain-to-brain communication to achieve a desired goal in a computer game. The brain-to-brain interface detects motor imagery in EEG signals recorded from one subject (the “sender”) and transmits this information over the internet to the motor cortex region of a second subject (the “receiver”). This allows the sender to cause a desired motor response in the receiver (a press on a touchpad) via TMS. We quantify the performance of the brain-to-brain interface in terms of the amount of information transmitted as well as the accuracies attained in (1) decoding the sender’s signals, (2) generating a motor response from the receiver upon stimulation, and (3) achieving the overall goal in the cooperative visuomotor task. Our results provide evidence for a rudimentary form of direct information transmission from one human brain to another using non-invasive means.

pop sci write up.

What is it Like to Have a Robopocalypic Brain Implant?

Jan Scheuermann is not your average experimental subject. Diagnosed with spinocerebellar degeneration, she is only able to move her head and neck. The paralysis, which began creeping over her muscles in 1996, has been devastating in many ways. Yet two years ago she seized an opportunity to turn her personal liability into an extraordinary asset for neuroscience. In 2012 Scheuermann elected to undergo brain surgery to implant two arrays of electrodes on her motor cortex, a band of tissue on the surface of the brain.

She did so as a volunteer in a multi-year study at the University of Pittsburgh to develop a better brain-computer interface. When she visits the lab, researchers hook up her brain to a robotic arm and hand, which she practices moving using her thoughts alone. The goal is to eventually allow other paralyzed individuals to regain function by wiring up their brains directly to a computer or prosthetic limb.

The electrodes in her head record the firing patterns of about 150 of her neurons. Specific patterns of neuronal activity encode her desire to perform different movements, such as swinging the arm to the left or clasping the fingers around a cup. Two thick cables relay the data from her neurons to a computer, where software can identify Scheuermann’s intentions. The computer can then issue appropriate commands to move the robotic limb.

On a typical workday, Jan Scheuermann arrives at the university around 9:15 am. Using her chin, she maneuvers her electric wheelchair into a research lab headed by neuroscientist Andrew Schwartz and settles in for a day of work. Scientific American Mind spoke to Scheuermann to learn more about her experience as a self-proclaimed “guinea pig extraordinaire.”

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WHOA! First Direct Brain to Brain Communication Demonstrated Over the Internet

In a first-of-its-kind study, an international team of neuroscientists and robotics engineers have demonstrated the viability of direct brain-to-brain communication in humans. Recently published in PLOS ONE the highly novel findings describe the successful transmission of information via the internet between the intact scalps of two human subjects – located 5,000 miles apart.

"We wanted to find out if one could communicate directly between two people by reading out the brain activity from one person and injecting brain activity into the second person, and do so across great physical distances by leveraging existing communication pathways," explains coauthor Alvaro Pascual-Leone, MD, PhD, Director of the Berenson-Allen Center for Noninvasive Brain Stimulation at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) and Professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School. "One such pathway is, of course, the internet, so our question became, 'Could we develop an experiment that would bypass the talking or typing part of internet and establish direct brain-to-brain communication between subjects located far away from each other in India and France ?'"

It turned out the answer was "yes."

link.

Hook it up to a radio or cell phone and you have telepathy, albeit artificial.

heh.  The Next Big Thing is a thinking cap.  ;)

Using Electrocorticography for Mind-Machine Interfaces

Last year, an epilepsy patient awaiting brain surgery at the renowned Johns Hopkins Hospital occupied her time with an unusual activity. While doctors and neuroscientists clustered around, she repeatedly reached toward a video screen, which showed a small orange ball on a table. As she extended her hand, a robotic arm across the room also reached forward and grasped the actual orange ball on the actual table. In terms of robotics, this was nothing fancy. What made the accomplishment remarkable was that the woman was controlling the mechanical limb with her brain waves.

The experiment in that Baltimore hospital room demonstrated a new approach in brain-machine interfaces (BMIs), which measure electrical activity from the brain and use the signal to control something. BMIs come in many shapes and sizes, but they all work fundamentally the same way: They detect the tiny voltage changes in the brain that occur when neurons fire to trigger a thought or an action, and they translate those signals into digital information that is conveyed to the machine.

To sense what’s going on in the brain, some systems use electrodes that are simply attached to the scalp to record the electroencephalographic signal. These EEG systems record from broad swaths of the brain, and the signal is hard to decipher. Other BMIs require surgically implanted electrodes that penetrate the cerebral cortex to capture the activity of individual neurons. These invasive systems provide much clearer signals, but they are obviously warranted only in extreme situations where doctors need precise information. The patient in the hospital room that day was demonstrating a third strategy that offers a compromise between those two methods. The gear in her head provided good signal quality at a lower risk by contacting—but not penetrating—the brain tissue.

link.

Mind Controlling Google Glass

DARPA Takes First SFnal Steps to Scalzi's BrainPals

DARPA has selected two universities to initially lead the agency’s Restoring Active Memory (RAM) program, which aims to develop and test wireless, implantable “neuroprosthetics” that can help servicemembers, veterans, and others overcome memory deficits incurred as a result of traumatic brain injury (TBI) or disease.

The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and the University of Pennsylvania (Penn) will each head a multidisciplinary team to develop and test electronic interfaces that can sense memory deficits caused by injury and attempt to restore normal function. Under the terms of separate cooperative agreements with DARPA, UCLA will receive up to $15 million and Penn will receive up to $22.5 million over four years, with full funding contingent on the performer teams successfully meeting a series of technical milestones. DARPA also has a cooperative agreement worth up to $2.5 million in place with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to develop an implantable neural device for the UCLA-led effort.

“The start of the Restoring Active Memory program marks an exciting opportunity to reveal many new aspects of human memory and learn about the brain in ways that were never before possible,” said DARPA Program Manager Justin Sanchez. “Anyone who has witnessed the effects of memory loss in another person knows its toll and how few options are available to treat it. We’re going to apply the knowledge and understanding gained in RAM to develop new options for treatment through technology.”

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Miguel Nicolelis' Mind Controlled Exoskeleton Going to Debut at World Cup

“The beautiful game” will have a robotic addition at this year’s World Cup kickoff.

Clad in a robotic body suit and a cap adorned with electrodes that will detect brain signals and cue leg movement, a paralyzed Brazilian will take to the pitch and move with the assistance of a specially designed exoskeleton during the opening ceremony of the World Cup on June 12.

Legions of fans tuning in to watch the event will see the debut of a technology that, according to its creators, will one day use people’s brain waves to control robotic limbs and effectively make wheelchairs obsolete. This initial demonstration is merely an early prototype, but Duke University neuroengineer Miguel Nicolelis, the man behind the project, envisions a future in which the brain–machine interface will allow individuals who have lost mobility from accidents or disease to get back on their feet—even if a robotic suit is needed to make that happen.

The technology hinges on sensors that listen to a barrage of electrical signals in the brain, reading and translating them into digital commands that, in turn, spark an artificial device to act on the brain’s prompts.

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DARPA Working on Brain Implants & Prostheses

The Pentagon has ambitious plans to develop a prosthetic for the brain that, if successful, will restore memory functions lost to troops who suffered brain injuries as well as people losing their pasts to Alzheimer’s disease.

The Restoring Active Memory — or RAM — is just one project among a broad, multi-agency program underway as part of the Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies initiative announced by the White House last year.

More than 300,000 service members have sustained traumatic brain injuries since the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, according to the Defense and Veterans Brain Injury Center. The Defense Advance Research Projects Agency, which is pumping $50 million into the research this year, said there currently are no effective therapies to treat the long-term effects of TBI on memory, notwithstanding the size of the problem.

“The specific end goal of RAM is to develop and test an implantable neural device for human clinical use to restore specific types or attributes of memories to individuals with memory deficits,” the agency says. The Pentagon will also be looking at new ways to treat mental health disorders, including depression, and to restore the ability of patients with Parkinson’s disease to control their movements.

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Nearing FIrefox Down: Thought Controlled Flight Demonstrated in "Brainflight" Project

The pilot is wearing a white cap with myriad attached cables. His gaze is concentrated on the runway ahead of him. All of a sudden the control stick starts to move, as if by magic. The airplane banks and then approaches straight on towards the runway. The position of the plane is corrected time and again until the landing gear gently touches down. During the entire maneuver the pilot touches neither pedals nor controls.

This is not a scene from a science fiction movie, but rather the rendition of a test at the Institute for Flight System Dynamics of the Technische Universität München (TUM). Scientists working for Professor Florian Holzapfel are researching ways in which brain controlled flight might work in the EU-funded project "Brainflight." "A long-term vision of the project is to make flying accessible to more people," explains aerospace engineer Tim Fricke, who heads the project at TUM. "With brain control, flying, in itself, could become easier. This would reduce the work load of pilots and thereby increase safety. In addition, pilots would have more freedom of movement to manage other manual tasks in the cockpit."

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Advances in Mind-Machine Interfaces: Reading Images Directly From the Brain

Monkey Controlling Monkey via Remote Control

Neuroscientists from Harvard University have put a whole new spin on the age-old saying “monkey see, monkey do,” after their brain implants allowed one monkey to control the actions of another monkey. Their findings could someday allow paralyzed individuals to control movement of their own limbs.

[...]

To accomplish the feat, scientists placed electrodes in the brain of a puppet-master rhesus monkey, while a sedated avatar monkey had electrodes wired to its spinal chord. A computer decoded the brain activity of the master and sent signals to the avatar’s spinal cord, whose hand was placed on a joystick controlling a cursor on the master’s screen.

The master monkey controlled the movement of the cursor by moving the avatar’s hand, and was rewarded each time he moved the cursor onto a target. In 98 percent of tests, the master could correctly control the avatar’s arm.

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Paper link.

Monkeys Learn to Mentally Control Multiple Computer Avatar Arms

Two monkeys learned to move avatar arms toward shifting targets (see animation), simply by putting their minds to it.

Monkey mind. Two monkeys learned to move avatar arms toward shifting targets (see animation below), simply by putting their minds to it.
Monkeys Use Minds to Control Avatar Arms

Most of us don’t think twice when we extend our arms to hug a friend or push a shopping cart—our limbs work together seamlessly to follow our mental commands. For researchers designing brain-controlled prosthetic limbs for people, however, this coordinated arm movement is a daunting technical challenge. A new study showing that monkeys can move two virtual limbs with only their brain activity is a major step toward achieving that goal, scientists say.

The brain controls movement by sending electrical signals to our muscles through nerve cells. When limb-connecting nerve cells are damaged or a limb is amputated, the brain is still able to produce those motion-inducing signals, but the limb can't receive them or simply doesn’t exist. In recent years, scientists have worked to create devices called brain-machine interfaces (BMIs) that can pick up these interrupted electrical signals and control the movements of a computer cursor or a real or virtual prosthetic.

So far, the success of BMIs in humans has been largely limited to moving single body parts, such as a hand or an arm. Last year, for example, a woman paralyzed from the neck down for 10 years commanded a robotic arm to pick up and lift a piece of chocolate to her mouth just by thinking about it. But, "no device will ever work for people unless it restores bimanual behaviors,” says neuroscientist Miguel Nicolelis at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, senior author of the paper. "You need to use both arms and hands for the simplest tasks.”

link.

Combine This With Boston Dynamic's Atlas and...

Never need to worry about a Zombie Apocalypse again.

I'd swap a kinect for hydra, but that's just me.

An Update on Direct Interfacing With the Human Brain

The first rat pressed a lever, anticipating the tasty reward it’d been trained to expect. An implant in the rat’s brain converted its neural activity into an electronic signal and beamed the impulse to the brain of the second rat, which leaped forward and pressed a lever in its own cage. But rat #2 had never been trained to press the lever. Its movement impulse came not from its own brain, but directly from the brain of rat #1 – despite the fact that the two were separated by thousands of miles.

What we have created, said lead researcher Miguel Nicolelis, is “a new central nervous system made of two brains.”

That advance happened in 2012, and other labs were quick to one-up Nicolelis and his team. In the summer of 2013, a team of Harvard University researchers engineered a brain-to-brain interface between a rat and a human, enabling the human to control the rat’s tail movements simply by willing them to happen.

Finally, in August 2013, University of Washington scientists Rajesh Rao and Andrea Stocco succeeded in making one leap everyone was waiting for: A human-to-human brain-to-brain interface. By strapping one person into a non-invasive EEG helmet, and strapping the second into a transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) helmet, the researchers mind-melded themselves – for the sake of science.

link.

Zac Vawter: A Step (!) Closer to SFnal Cyborgism

Thanks to the first-ever mind-controlled prosthetic leg, a 32-year-old amputee is one bionic step closer to walking like normal, according to a study published this week.

The prosthetic leg bends and moves much like the average leg. More impressive is the fact that it performs these motions with only the wearer’s thoughts. The test pilot in this case, a software engineer named Zac Vawter, lost his leg in a motorcycle accident a few years ago.

Though mind-controlled prosthetic arms have been successful in people, this is the first such lower limb. Unlike many prosthetics today, like running blades, its movement doesn’t rely on a spring-like response. This allows Vawter to more easily transition between different movements like standing up, walking, or climbing stairs, and improves upon the earlier prototype we covered in November when Vawter used it to climb the 103-story Willis Tower.

The researchers rewired the severed nerves (those connected to muscles below the amputated knee) to Vawter’s still-intact hamstring muscle. This redirected his brain’s movement messages to sensors in the prosthetic. These sensors communicate with a computer to translate the nerve messages to actual movements of the robotic leg.

The Future is Here: Controlling Machines With Thought

Emotiv Lifesciences, the company Le co-founded, produces portable, high-resolution EEG (electroencephalogram) brain-scanning headsets that Le hopes will open new windows on the complex functioning of our brain. On August 1, Emotiv unveiled Emotiv Insight, a faster, next-generation wireless brain scanner that collects real-time data on the wearer's thoughts and feelings and delivers it directly to a computer, phone, or other device through Android, iOS, OSX, Linux, and Windows platforms.

Le hopes the product, which costs $199, can further democratize brain research and help scientists gather more data. Using the EEG headsets, she says, people around the world can study brains under conditions and stimuli as varied as those we encounter in everyday life—because subjects can wear the headset while doing everyday tasks.

[...]

Here are four applications of the portable brain scanners that Le says are already beginning to take shape:

1. Moving Things With the Mind

The EEG headset has helped paralyzed patients control an electric wheelchair and make music via computer using only the power of their minds, said Le.

[...]

2. Diagnosing Disease

Le stresses that because we lack a large, easily accessible database of "normal" brain data, we're likely missing opportunities to identify and track the causes of brain ailments from their earliest stages—when intervention might be less dramatic and more successful.

[...]

3. Making Learning Easier

With EEG technology becoming more affordable, scientists and citizens alike can get a more complete picture of how each individual brain operates in real-world situations, ranging from social interactions to studying to intense physical activity, said Le.

[...]

4. Organizing Data by Thoughts and Emotions

Le suggests that brain-scan information could one day be used to help people organize the avalanche of data, videos, images, audio, and other media that is steadily mounting.

My bet.  Computers will be something like this attached to Google Glass (or a competitor) and something the size of a cell phone which you will wear.  This will be tied into the cloud where your data will be stored and there will be a wireless graphics channel for when you want to talk to large screens, something like Bluetooth but on steroids and have a wireless connection to your cell phone company of choice.