bci

Brain implants let paralyzed woman move robot arm

Jan Scheuermann can't use her limbs to feed herself, but she's pretty good at grabbing a chocolate bar with her robot arm.

She's become the first to demonstrate that people with a long history of quadriplegia can successfully manipulate a mind-controlled robot arm with seven axes of movement. Earlier experiments had shown that robot arms work with brain implants.

Scheuerman was struck by spinocerebellar degeneration in 1996. A study on the brain-computer interface (BCI) linking Scheuermann to her prosthetic was published online in this month's issue of medical journal The Lancet.

Training on the BCI allowed her to move an arm and manipulate objects for the first time in nine years, surprising researchers.

It took her less than a year to be able to seize a chocolate bar with the arm, after which she declared, "One small nibble for a woman, one giant bite for BCI." Check it out in the video below. … Read more

Scientists start hacking minds with cheap EEG gear

Are the deepest secrets of your mind safe? Could thieves trick you into revealing your bank card PIN or computer passwords just by thinking about them?

Theoretically, it could happen.

Ivan Martinovic of the University of Oxford and colleagues at the University of Geneva and University of California at Berkeley describe research into that question in a paper entitled "On the Feasibility of Side-Channel Attacks With Brain-Computer Interfaces" presented earlier this month at the 21st USENIX Security Symposium.

The research was inspired by the growing number of games and other mind apps available for low-cost consumer EEG devices such as Emotiv's EPOC headset, which lets users interact with computers using their thoughts alone. … Read more

Indendix EEG lets you type with your brain

Austrian biomedical firm Guger Technologies is promoting a new electroencephalography (EEG) device that lets users type with their minds, calling it the world's first commercial brain-machine interface for personal use.

Consisting of an EEG cap, display, and computer, Intendix is designed for severely disabled patients and people with symptoms of locked-in syndrome, a condition (featured in the movie "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly") in which patients suffer near-total paralysis while their minds continue to function normally.

After only 10 minutes of training, most patients can type 5-10 characters per minute by focusing on each character on … Read more