Brain-Machine Interface Isn’t Sci-Fi Anymore

#News(General) [ via IoTForIndiaGroup ]

Thomas Reardon puts a terrycloth stretch band with microchips and electrodes woven into the fabric—a steampunk version of jewelry—on each of his forearms. “This demo is a mind fuck,” says Reardon, who prefers to be called by his surname only.
That’s cool, but what makes it more than a magic trick is how it’s happening. 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. Whether or not Reardon’s digits actually drum the table is irrelevant—whether he has a hand is irrelevant—it’s a loop of his brain to machine. What’s more, Reardon and his colleagues have found that the machine can pick up more subtle signals—like the twitches of a finger—rather than mimicking actual typing.

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. By next year, they want to slim down the clunky armband prototype into a sleeker, watch strap-style so that a slew of early adopters can dispense with their keyboards and the tiny buttons on their smartphones’ screens. The technology also has the potential to vastly improve the virtual reality experience, which currently alienates new users by asking them to hit buttons on controllers that they can’t see. There might be no better way to move around and manipulate an alternate world than with a system controlled by the brain.

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