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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.
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.
That's not typing by brain. That's typing by muscles. It won't work for paralyzed people like Stephen Hawking.
(T>t && O(n)--) == sqrt(666)
Only this time he is typing on...nothing. Just the flat tabletop.
Since the tabletop does not give, he gets carpal tunnel syndrome even faster!
The main barrier is that nobody has found a way to connect electronic circuits to neural tissue in a sustainable way. The body rejects that shit sooner or later.
Couldn't be bothered to do your research before posting?
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Okay, while this may be pretty handy in some cases, but I am hoping people are taking into account that IF it is brain activity that simulates a keyboard based on what your thinking..... Get where this is going. No more thinking about last night with your wife, no more cubicle walks ups that will interrupt your thought process, and holy cow, do we need to reference the micro-managing boss scenario? I see benefits and the opposite with technology like this. I just hope someone does think about this.
It would be kind of bad if a co-worker drops by and "Yea, I would tap that" shows up on your screen.
I just bought Mavis Beacon :(
OMG facts!
And it doesn't help most of the people who would need a 'typing by brain' interface - because the reason they need it is usually that the signals their brain is trying to send don't get anywhere near their muscles because parts of the brain or the spinal cord are not working as they should.