Real-world applications
- The technology could one day replace remote controls and keyboards and perhaps help disabled people operate electric wheelchairs, beds or artificial limbs.
- Initial uses would be helping people with paralyzing diseases communicate even after they have lost all control of their muscles.
- Since 2005, Hitachi has sold a device based on optical topography that monitors brain activity in paralyzed patients so they can answer simple questions -- for example, by doing mental calculations to indicate "yes" or thinking of nothing in particular to indicate "no."
- "We are thinking of various kinds of applications," project leader Hideaki Koizumi said. "Locked-in patients can speak to other people by using this kind of brain-machine interface."
- A key advantage to Hitachi's technology is that sensors don't have to physically enter the brain. Earlier technologies developed by U.S. companies like Neural Signals required implanting a chip under the skull.
- Still, major stumbling blocks remain.
- Size is one issue, though Hitachi has developed a prototype compact headband and mapping machine that together weigh only about two pounds.
- Another would be to tweak the interface to more accurately pick up on the correct signals while ignoring background brain activity.
- Any brain-machine interface device for widespread use would be "a little further down the road," Koizumi said.
- He added, however, that the technology is entertaining in itself and could easily be applied to toys.
- "It's really fun to move a model train just by thinking," he said.
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