Paralyzed Woman Controls Robotic Arm With Her Mind

The smile on that lady's face says more than any number of facebook 'likes' or google +1's could ever do for me, that's a real and measurable quality of life improvement for a single person, this really makes a difference.

The engineering on that arm is pretty heavy duty, I wonder what it weighs and how fast it could move and what kind of safeguards are built in to avoid the operator injuring themselves due to glitches in the system. If you look at the way the arm moves it is actually quite comparable to the arm of a baby that moves an object to its mouth the first couple of times.

With one big difference, a baby may get it wrong but it is not strong enough to do too much damage, even if it pokes itself in the eye every now and then it is usually with very little force. This arm however looks engineered to be strong enough and fast enough that it could do real damage to the operator or its environment. If that's servo driven there has to be a whole slew of safety systems in case a driver decides to hook a motor to V+ or V- because of a blown FET.

In any real-world machinery situation where the machinery is under software control and has the capability of doing real harm (for instance: machine shops with CNC gear) there are normally countless interlock systems that you'd have to bypass before you could get yourself in contact with a piece of it moving under control of the computer. In this case the operator is extremely exposed and I cringed when the arm sped up towards her face with the bottle. I also found myself sort of 'willing the bottle' in the right direction, they way some movies will have you react to something on the screen. Hard to describe.

This is not a soft hand moving either, it looks like it is made of pretty strong aluminum and fairly heavy.

EDIT: the full video (or at least, the one I saw) is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=o...

1) stability of the electrode array over long timescales.

2) increasing the number of degrees of freedom of robust control that we can decode from the neural data. Activity in the motor cortex inherently lives in a (very) roughly 10 dimensional space, which is a bit of a mystery since we use thy activity to control hundreds of muscles independently. What this means, is that when you record from 96 electrodes simultaneously, many of the neurons picked up by the array are correlated, such that the resulting dimensionality is much lower than the number of neurons

3) An important step forward will be to develope optogenetic (or other) sensory write in, using pulses of light to activate neutrons in specific patterns that mimic priprioceptive signals from your limbs. This will increase the speed and robustness of movent via faster closed loop feedback.

4) Processing power. Currently it's typical to run decoders on real-time PC's. Creating an embedded processor capable of sufficiently low power operation with enough processing power to run the decode is non-trivial, especially if you want to implant this in the brain.

It is very unlikely, as suggested elsewhere, that current web tech will impact BMI research at all. The primary interesting tech is in the decode algorithm, which is a modified form of the Kalman filter. There is, however, a lot of room for hackers in research. I recently made the switch from working in defense, building robots and designing sensor fusion algorithms, to a phd in neuroscience. Probably won't pay as well long term, but it's far more rewarding and interesting! I'm surrounded by scientists that need better (software and hardware) tools and analysis methods. Also, an infusion of ideas and values aligned with open access publishing (or changing the scientific publishing model altogether), open source software, data and code sharing, etc. would generally benefit all and accelerate scientific research, but that's another topic worthy of more discussion elsewhere.

How the hell is this area of science NOT sexy? Are you kidding me? IMHO, this is the ultimate in science, interfacing the human being directly with technology. That is a "sexy" as it gets, its right up there with CERN and spacey stuff. Stockings and suspenders couldn't make this more sexy.

And if that aint good enough for "us" then I merely have this to say, "think Russian".

Not sexy, pah!!!!

Not being in this field is possibly the only professional regret I have. I bow to you and your colleagues. Keep up the SEXY work.