Thursday, October 29, 2020

Brain Computer Interface Enables Advances in Neuroscience

Very recommendable! This is almost a review article of this subject with quite a bit of history.

I am personally more interested in a human computer interface that would allow my brain to store, process, and retrieve enormous amounts of information. How about instant access to the entire content of Wikipedia?

"... Although EEG took a back seat in neuroscience with the advent of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) in the 1970s and ’80s, the technology has been making a comeback in recent years ... thanks in no small part to the fact that it can be taken on the go. The first “mobile” EEG setups involved packing traditional equipment into backpacks, an approach that was cumbersome and produced noisy data. In the late 2000s and early 2010s, at least half a dozen companies sprang up to offer more-practical setups. These products were expensive, with price points in the thousands or tens of thousands of dollars. The equipment was designed with researchers, not consumers, in mind.

But soon, the first low-cost devices began to hit the market. In 2009, San Francisco–based EMOTIV launched its first headset, which had 14 electrodes—still far fewer than the 32 or 64 of a traditional EEG cap—and cost researchers just $750. That same year, NeuroSky released MindSet, a pair of consumer-targeted headphones with an arm that positioned a sin-gle electrode on the forehead—for $199. (MindFlex and another EEG-based toy—Uncle Milton’s Force Trainer, which similarly allowed users to control a ball by concentrating while hearing instructions from Yoda—were also released in 2009 and used chips sold by NeuroSky.) And in 2014, InteraXon launched Muse. With four electrodes and a price of $150, it became the first consumer product to make real inroads into research. ..."

The Rise of BCI Enables Advances in Neuroscience | The Scientist Magazine® A nascent but growing consumer market for brain-computer interface technology is driving the development of sleek new tools for decoding brain activity.

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