Thought and Action, Part II.

A couple weeks ago I blogged about a story from the BBC (found via Engadget) about researchers at SUNY Albany who had developed software that can process a person's brain waves, allowing the person to control a cursor without actually moving. The four subjects, two of whom were partially paralyzed, wore standard EEG caps and played a very simple game wherein they had 10 seconds to move a cursor from the center of the screen to a target at the edge. The results were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Since then Ruchira has been telling me that she has heard of similar projects, and today she sent me a link to Brainfingers.com. It's a rather bare bones website, but it seems to describe a much more immediately useful version of the same basic idea: the user wears a headband which transmits electrical signals to a computer, and the Cyberlink software processes two kinds of brain waves, lateral eye movement, and "yellow muscle movement"--which would appear to be raising one's eyebrows or tightening one's jaw. The user then trains with the software until they can control a mouse without using their hands. The company has an impressive list of testimonials, mostly from suffers of ALS (also known as Lou Gehrig's disease, and what Steven Hawking has.) Strictly speaking it's not quite the same thing as the Albany research, because there is willed muscle movement involved, not just brain waves.

If you're interested in playing around with these ideas and technologies, Ruchira has some more links for you: the book Mind Hacks now has a weblog and the Open EEG project aims to create low cost EEG hardware and software.