Future Now
The IFTF Blog
I hope that chip in your brain won't cause problems at airport security
I love it when BoingBoing ("a directory of wonderful things") ends up being the source for one of my posts. This tweet headline defintely caught my eye: "Researchers expand clinical study of brain implant." Sure enough, BoingBoing guest blogger Joshua Foer writes that he is "excited to see that the BrainGate Neural Interface System is moving to phase-II clinical testing." So am I!
Our Health and Health Care 2020 research has led us to forecast that neurointerventions will have an important impact on health and health care over the next decade. Brain Gate is an excellent signal of that future. The company's tagline, Turning Thoughts into Action, sums it up. In simple terms, its technology will allow "patients with brain stem stroke, ALS, and spinal cord injuries to eventually be able to control prosthetic limbs directly from their brains."
In fancier marketing language,
The concept of using thought to move a robotic device, a wheelchair, a prosthetic, or a computer was once strictly the stuff of science fiction, but no longer. BrainGate™ collects and analyzes the brainwaves of individuals with pronounced physical disabilities, turning thoughts into actions. The potential to better communicate, interact, and improve people’s way of life is about to explode.
How does it work? Foer explains it this way:
Brain Gate is:
A baby aspirin-size brain sensor containing 100 electrodes, each thinner than a human hair, that connects to the surface of the motor cortex (the part of the brain that enables voluntary movement), registers electrical signals from nearby neurons, and transmits them through gold wires to a set of computers, processors and monitors.
Foer goes on to describe meeting a locked-in patient (he can only move his eyes up and down) who is participating in the only other FDA-approved clinical trial of a brain-computer interface. The hope is that he might someday use his neural implant—which only has a single electrode—to control a digital voice. Early research is promising. So, in theory, the Brain Gate implant, which has 100 electrodes, will be able to differentiate signals from a far greater number of neurons. It blows my mind (figuratively, not literally, of course).