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http://www.cyberkineticsinc.com/content/medicalproducts/braingate.jsp

Here's a link to the actual company and its technology used. This technology could be extremely helpful for soldiers or people who lost their limbs in traumatic accidents.

Brain Chip That Reads Mind

BrainGate

The article does a great job surveying some of the major players in the field. I think all of the cited researchers have received grants from the NIH Neural Prosthesis Program.

As mentioned in the article, BCI research is proceeding along invasive, intra-cortical lines as well as more data-processing intensive EEG-based approaches. The latter methods affix EEG leads on the scalp, record brain waves, and employ powerful computer methods to decipher the results. Noise is a problem, so researchers have embraced the more invasive approach of implanting chips directly into the brain. That's what Cyberkinetics and Neural Signals are doing.

The Lab of Brain-Computer Interfaces, Technical University of Graz, has an active group researching BCI, both through EEG and implanted electrodes. I'm surprised they don't get more press. There's also interesting work going on at Anderson's Caltech lab using the posterior parietal cortex, which might have some advantages. Check out the nice slide show on their research.

One person who is a quadriplegic recently (this past year) had a chip implanted. He can now control things by thinking about it.

Here are some other articles from a google and some things I have marked...

• Electric dreams
• Brain chip offers hope for paralyzed
• A company with a potential product
• Clubbers choose chip implants to jump queues
• A collectino of references to articles on Neural interfaces
• A display in thin air.
• Some people who do not see some things as good.

I think voice recognition and eye tracking are going to cause people to suffer from the same repeditive stress injuries that the keyboard and mouse are inflicting on people today.

When I was younger I didn't really believe in carpel tunnel. I just thought the hypochondriacs were at it again. But ten years of typing and mousing have just killed my wrists. If I bang them funny, my whole wrists will turn numb.

Anyway I suspect that constant blinking and talking are going to cause similar problems. Not only that, I can type faster than I can speak. And I can think a lot faster than I can type.

IMHO the only efficient and ergonomic solution is a neural interface. And aparently its not completely unplausible: http://www.cyberkineticsinc.com/.

It looked amazing to me. It looked rather like early pong games, the user just learned how to move the small dot onto the large one. Nothing real precise, but imagine 30 years from now...

Well, to get a truer understanding of what is possible you'd need a measure of information transfer from the surface of the scalp. It's kinda like a 120 baud modem. Controlling, in one dimension (or even two dimensions), a cursor, is not a task requiring massive bandwidth. Could be analogous, though, to piloting a wheelchair around the house.

Now, think of the bandwidth required to type this message in at /. I put out 14 keystrokes per second, each one a choice of about 2^6 available keys. Maybe 1200 baud to capture the text production, several times more than that to control my fingers using sensory feedback.

The real limitation, to anyone that has looked at scalp potentials, and invasive techniques, is the information transfer rate. The scalp will always be at least an order of magnitude (maybe several) behind. Even surface potentials (sub-cranial, but still not within the brain) are an order of magnitude behind invasive signals. An invasive implant carries the possibility of transferring information at the same rate, or faster than a human can with his motor output. Scalp potentials will always be far far far behind. It is certainly worth exploring how far you can get with a scalp potential signal, but in another 10 years Cyberkinetics will be allowing humans deprived of motor output to send text streams at realistic rates to computers to interact with their environment. That is the future I look forward to.

Yes.

Upcoming talk and demonstration on the development of Brain-Computer Interfaces: http://www.notacon.org/speakers.html#lowne (shameless plug)

Invasive, motor-cortical BCI development at Utah: http://www.bioen.utah.edu/cni/Projects/Motor.htm

Mike Gibbs' work with BCIs at Oxford University's Robotics Group: http://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~mgibbs/research.html

The Neural Prostheses program at the National Institutes of Health includes calls for proposals in BCI development: http://www.ninds.nih.gov/npp/

The University of British Columbia's BCI research group: http://www.ece.ubc.ca/~garyb/BCI.htm

Results of the 2003 Brain Computer interface competition (focuses on signal processing techniques): http://ida.first.fraunhofer.de/projects/bci/compet ition/results/index.html

BCI development at the Cognitive Science and Technology group at the Helsinki University of Technology: http://www.lce.hut.fi/research/bci/

Dr. Jessica Bayliss's BCI work and extensive bibliography (very important, seminal work on BCI development): http://www.cs.rit.edu/~jdb/research/ and http://www.cs.rit.edu/~jdb/research/baylissThesis. pdf

Dr. Charles Anderson's work at Colorado State University with EEG pattern classification in BCI systems: http://www.cs.colostate.edu/eeg/index.html

Manchester University's Toby Howard has written some good articles on BCIs, mostly for Popular Science: http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/aig/staff/toby/research/bc i/

Dr. Michael Black at Brown University teaches a course in BCI development: http://www.cs.brown.edu/courses/cs295-7/home.html

Cyberkinetics, Inc. makes medical-use BCIs: http://www.cyberkineticsinc.com/

...for processing the data from the microelectrode arrays.

Yes, the above link goes to another web site called "bionictech.com", but the two companies merged in 2002.

And we also sit around talking about technology being developed to help the disabled. This article is one such example. The first paragraph of cyberkinetics' website specifically addresses treating nervous system disorders.

You seem to be really caught up on your idea of "everyone is selfish". My comment about selfishness was addressing your argument about economic motivation. Could I have possibly been saying that just because there isn't a profit to be made (and for sure there is in this) doesn't mean people won't do something to help others? Ever hear of doctors without borders?

To address the other type of selfishness that you digress into, apparently there are people who will give more than just a finger for people they dont' know. They're called the armed forces.

Just look at their Additional applications include the monitoring and treatment of psychiatric diseases