This Is Your Brain(waves) on Technology

What if monitoring your brain were equally like shooting fish in a barrel every bit monitoring your center charge per unit via a Fitbit device? Two San Diego-based companies—Qusp and Cognionics—are working to make that a reality.

With the assist of a DARPA grant, Cognionics has developed a "dry out" 64-channel headset that allows for more portable, less invasive electroencephalograms (EEGs). Dry in this instance means the gadget does not require researchers to attach electrodes to the heads of their subjects using mucilaginous conductor gel which, as co-founder and CEO Michael Elconin pointed out, "is time-consuming and messy to employ, and makes you want to accept a shower afterwards."

Cognionics headset "Our work for the DARPA project has shown nosotros tin can produce not-contact, biopotential sensor systems that deliver a loftier-quality point, including EEG," Elconin told PCMag. "Our headset is likewise commercially feasible: cost effective for its intended audience, lightweight and, most chiefly, easy to employ and portable."

The headsets, which are intended primarily for researchers, volition ready you dorsum approximately $15,000 a unit of measurement. But how practice they work?

"We have 2 kinds of sensors—for hair and skin. Ane is fabricated from silver and carbon deposits on specially formulated plastic, the other with hydrogel nether a conductive membrane," said Dr. Yu Mike Chi, co-founder and CTO (pictured at right), holding up a headset. "The organization tin can pick up whatsoever of the bio-markers," so non only EEG but also centre, muscle movement, and heart movement.

Chi let me give it a attempt. He pulled out what looked similar octopus tentacles, opened up the headset, and placed it carefully on my head. Then he arranged the sensors so they made contact with my scalp through my pilus. It was an odd sensation: somewhere between sitting under one of those 1960s salon-way full head/hard hat chimera pilus dryers and sharing a motorbike helmet with a agglomeration of cats with not-so-sharp claws.

Chi and Elconin looked at the laptop for a while as I tried to summon upward a peaceful embankment somewhere in my heed's eye. "You're non much of an Alpha generator," said Chi, finally.

Most disappointing that all my years of meditating oasis't resulted in a smooth Zen brain wave design. Apparently I'm all caffeine. Withal, information technology was pretty trippy to expect inside my brain. And it'due south clear that a lot of united states might be doing this in the not-so-distant future.

Dry EEG

Data captured by the headset is analyzed by technology from Qusp (pronounced "cusp"), the brainchild of founder and CEO Dr. Tim Mullen (pictured left) and CTO Christian Kothe.

"As a Berkeley undergrad, I was initially interested in information science and A.I.," Mullen told PCMag. "I wanted to build software that could intelligently interact with users. Then I saw how neuroscience could redefine human-auto interaction, and my love affair with computational neuroscience began. Afterward virtually a decade of scientific progress in the field, Qusp was created to enable widespread integration of advanced neuro-technology into everyday applications."

Kothe was on a similar inquiry trajectory back in his native Federal republic of germany. "My squad's piece of work on brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) and software for researchers to analyze Electroencephalogram encephalon signals came to the attention of the Swartz Center and they invited us to the The states," said Kothe. "This is how I met Tim and, ultimately, decided to join Qusp as CTO."

The upshot is a cloud-based middleware platform called NeuroScale, currently in beta, which interfaces with a variety of brain and body sensors and interprets these signals in real-fourth dimension using Qusp'southward Python computational engine, or NeuroPype. Companies and individuals tin can utilize commercial hardware and Qusp's software and spider web APIs to build "encephalon-aware" applications with minimal neuroscience expertise.

Kothe put on a Cognionics headset, and started up the NeuroPype software, showing how its drag-and-driblet interface allows for rapid construction of pipelines to monitor and classify encephalon activeness in existent-time. He blinked a few times to demonstrate signal quality, and then pointed out his own brain moving ridge patterns, including signals extracted from specific brain regions using a technique called "Beamforming."

A pipeline tin can be deployed via NeuroScale for existent-fourth dimension access anywhere. For example, Mullen called upwards a real-time 3D view of activity within Kothe's encephalon on a split up flat-screen display. He and then switched to a view of Kothe'due south brain networks. On his telephone, he displayed the same 3D encephalon visualization.

"Since all computation is carried out on the cloud, we are not limited by a device'south CPU or power constraints, or even location," Mullen pointed out. "You lot could be on the NYC metro using your telephone to explore live brain activity from someone in a clinic in San Diego."

"Our goal is to allow non-scientists to rapidly build on advanced neurotechnology, such every bit this, through like shooting fish in a barrel-to-utilise graphical interfaces and spider web APIs," Mullen explained. "But what's of import is that in simplifying the software we've non degraded the science. Our goal is to preserve the richness of the computation and neuroscience, merely also empower not-scientists to develop the next generation of neurotechnology applications."

What does that hateful in the real world? Mullen pointed to a soldier who suffers a caput injury in the field. "Neurodiagnostic software could detect encephalon damage and indicate medical treatment is needed," he explained. "Early on detection and intervention could prevent secondary impairment, for instance, due to brain inflammation, which may be very hard to later care for."

The technology could also exist subconscious inside medically modified baseball caps for unobtrusive brain stimulation and edifice new elastic tissue. Information technology could assist offset Alzheimer's or other mind disorders or predict mental and emotional states for those with clinical depression. Perhaps our future robot helpers could be fed insight into our moods in order to help with routine tasks or mediate our feel.

So if you tin peek into one brain, can you network a few together? Non in a "hive heed" (hullo, Borg) but in a "a few heads are amend than one" sort of a way?

"Yep," smiled Mullen. "In fact, nosotros take a fun little game chosen Tractor Axle that demonstrates this possibility."

Tractor Beam, powered past NeuroScale, measures a focused attending state from frontal lobe brain action to capture onscreen objects. The three men battled it out via their brainwaves, each trying to lock a digital "tractor beam" on a pixelated ball, and guide it to his digital "goal post." Mullen had obviously been practicing, and won easily.

There was likewise a 4th player on the field, but merely three humans. Who was the mystery player? "Ah," said Mullen. "That'southward a bot using pre-recorded data from someone who had already played the game. So you could play with friends who aren't here, or confronting yourself from a few days ago, to see if you've improved concentration."

The melding of (hu)human and machine in real-time, in issue.

This article originally appeared on PCMag.com.