On Brain-Computer Interfaces, Facebook and more

Last week, researchers at the University of California - San Francisco (UCSF) said they had successfully developed a “speech neuroprosthesis” that has enabled a man with severe paralysis to communicate in sentences, translating signals from his brain to the vocal tract directly into words that appear as text on a screen.”

• UCSF neurosurgeon Edward Chang, MD said: “To our knowledge, this is the first successful demonstration of direct decoding of full words from the brain activity of someone who is paralyzed and cannot speak … It shows strong promise to restore communication by tapping into the brain's natural speech machinery.

• “With speech, we normally communicate information at a very high rate, up to 150 or 200 words per minute … Going straight to words, as we’re doing here, has great advantages because it’s closer to how we normally speak.”

• Separately Facebook, in a blog post, said “While we still believe in the long-term potential of head-mounted optical [brain computer interface] technologies, we’ve decided to focus our immediate efforts on a different neural interface approach that has a nearer-term path to market: wrist-based devices powered by electromyography (EMG).

• “Here’s how EMG works: When you decide to move your hands and fingers, your brain sends signals down your arm via motor neurons, telling them to move in specific ways in order to perform actions like tapping or swiping. EMG can pick up and decode those signals — the hand and finger movements you’ve already decided to make — at the wrist and translate them into digital commands for your device.

• "In the near term, these signals will let you communicate with your device with a degree of control that’s highly reliable, subtle, personalizable, and adaptable to many situations. As this area of research evolves, EMG-based neural interfaces have the potential to dramatically expand the bandwidth with which we can communicate with our devices, opening up the possibility of things like high-speed typing.”

OUR TAKE

• While brain-computer interface technology is often associated with medicine /health care, the future of BCIs will be broad-based, including military, sports, entertainment, gaming, and design uses.

• Facebook's increased focus on non-head-mounted devices highlights that BCI solutions will incorporate many form factors. Physical style and design will be crucial factors in driving their market acceptance.

• Because BCIs collect and analyze a user's personal data, managing privacy-related issues will continue to be important.