Typing By Brain Arrives: No Surgery Necessary (wired.com)

mirandakatz writes: 2017 has been a coming-out year of sorts for the brain-machine interface. But the main barrier to adoption is the potentially invasive nature of a BMI: Not many people are going to want to get surgery to have a chip implanted in their brains. A New York company may have found a solution to that. It's created a BMI that works just by an armband -- and it works now, not in some far-off future.
Steven Levy describes a recent demo by the CEO of CTRL-Labs: After [typing] a few lines of text, he pushes the keyboard away... He resumes typing. Only this time he is typing on...nothing. Just the flat tabletop. Yet the result is the same: The words he taps out appear on the monitor... The text on the screen is being generated not by his fingertips, but rather by the signals his brain is sending to his fingers. The armband is intercepting those signals, interpreting them correctly, and relaying the output to the computer, just as a keyboard would have...

CTRL-Labs, which comes with both tech bona fides and an all-star neuroscience advisory board, bypasses the incredibly complicated tangle of connections inside the cranium and dispenses with the necessity of breaking the skin or the skull to insert a chip -- the Big Ask of BMI. Instead, the company is concentrating on the rich set of signals controlling movement that travel through the spinal column, which is the nervous system's low-hanging fruit. Reardon and his colleagues at CTRL-Labs are using these signals as a powerful API between all of our machines and the brain itself.

Comments

Misleading title

[Ken_g6]

That's not typing by brain. That's typing by muscles. It won't work for paralyzed people like Stephen Hawking.

Re:Misleading title

[Kjella]

That's not typing by brain. That's typing by muscles. It won't work for paralyzed people like Stephen Hawking.

Why not? I would think that even if my hand was paralyzed or amputated I could imagine typing and the brain would send the signals, it just wouldn't arrive at the muscles. I suppose if you've been that way since birth it might be different, but I'm not so certain. I mean even if it's not working you'd think the brain is still wired to try. Don't some advanced prosthetics work like that, they're not just mechanical but they actually read the nerve impulses to recognize what you're trying to do. If you could pair this up with a VR/AR headset maybe you could learn to use virtual hands.

The downside is of course that there's no physical truth to compare to, but if I could see the computer's interpretation of it we could work on that, like this is me counting on my fingers one-two-three-four-five, this is me bending my index finger forward, this is me curling my index finger, this is me bending it sideways, this me doing V for victory, a fist, giving you the finger, the horns, the Spock greeting, the okay sign etc. and then I could virtually type on a virtual keyboard. It could go a helluva lot faster than eye tracking.

Well done

[JustNiz]

You've just won the prize for the most disingenuous headline of the day.
You still have to type with your hands, so its basically fucking pointless because you could just use a keyboard.