Paralyzed Woman Controls Robotic Arm With Her Mind • Hacker News Board

Re: Paralyzed Woman Controls Robotic Arm With Her Mind

#31

Post by jplewicke » Thu, May 17, 2012, 2:29 PM UTC

blhack wrote: post #24

kevinalexbrown wrote: post #6

Disclaimer: I work in a similar lab (my adviser was advised by the senior author on the paper, who runs the lab) on a brain-machine interface project funded by DARPA. What makes this awesome from a scientific point of view: 1) 2-dimensional decoders, where an individual controls a mouse with their mind, have existed for a while. What makes this really cool is that there are actually quite a few degrees of freedom in…

The feedback is something that a couple of friends of mine and I are working on. There are a few things that we've talked about are: 1) Heat. Patches that can be placed on areas of your skin that will increase/decrease heat quickly as a way of giving forece-feedback. This was just something we talked about briefly, and I really don't know how workable it is. I don't know offhand of any materials that can rapidly go f…

What about vibrating motors placed in different locations? I've always been intrigued by this kind of vibrating compass-belt: http://www.gradman.com/hapticcompass .

Re: Paralyzed Woman Controls Robotic Arm With Her Mind

#32

Post by blhack » Thu, May 17, 2012, 3:31 PM UTC

jplewicke wrote: post #31

blhack wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The feedback is something that a couple of friends of mine and I are working on. There are a few things that we've talked about are: 1) Heat. Patches that can be placed on areas of your skin that will increase/decrease heat quickly as a way of giving forece-feedback. This was just something we talked about briefly, and I really don't know how workable it is. I don't know offhand of any materials that can rapidly go f…

What about vibrating motors placed in different locations? I've always been intrigued by this kind of vibrating compass-belt: http://www.gradman.com/hapticcompass .

Ha! A friend of mine built something exactly like that for blind people [not for judging direction, I think for judging proximity to objects].

Haptics is a really awesome field that I feel is going to be really really important moving forward with some of this new HCI stuff.

Re: Paralyzed Woman Controls Robotic Arm With Her Mind

#33

Post by blhack » Thu, May 17, 2012, 4:16 PM UTC

blhack wrote: post #24

kevinalexbrown wrote: post #6

Disclaimer: I work in a similar lab (my adviser was advised by the senior author on the paper, who runs the lab) on a brain-machine interface project funded by DARPA. What makes this awesome from a scientific point of view: 1) 2-dimensional decoders, where an individual controls a mouse with their mind, have existed for a while. What makes this really cool is that there are actually quite a few degrees of freedom in…

The feedback is something that a couple of friends of mine and I are working on. There are a few things that we've talked about are: 1) Heat. Patches that can be placed on areas of your skin that will increase/decrease heat quickly as a way of giving forece-feedback. This was just something we talked about briefly, and I really don't know how workable it is. I don't know offhand of any materials that can rapidly go f…

I can no longer edit, but if anybody is curious what the prototype "zapper" thing looked like:

http://thingist.com/t/item/20483/

This was something I put together over an evening, so it's really rough (just a PoC). What I was actually doing here was tying the electrodes to different events on my webserver. The idea here being that the "force feedback", could indicate to me how much traffic was hitting different areas.

I almost constantly tail -f /var/log/apache/access_log. This was supposed to be a wearable version of that :).

(The project, for me, changed a bit after this. What I'm working on now is a general purpose haptic device that can be tied to arbitrary inputs around your environment)

Re: Paralyzed Woman Controls Robotic Arm With Her Mind

#34

Post by cobrausn » Thu, May 17, 2012, 4:31 PM UTC

johnpaulhayes wrote: post #25

kevinalexbrown wrote: post #6

Disclaimer: I work in a similar lab (my adviser was advised by the senior author on the paper, who runs the lab) on a brain-machine interface project funded by DARPA. What makes this awesome from a scientific point of view: 1) 2-dimensional decoders, where an individual controls a mouse with their mind, have existed for a while. What makes this really cool is that there are actually quite a few degrees of freedom in…

No doubt this is amazing. But a question strikes me... why is a military organisation funding this research? By their very nature, are they not in the business of disabling enemies (a.k.a people)? Just strikes me as odd but I can see the potential of weaponizing this technology.

Dismemberment and lost limbs is fairly rare among the civilian population. This is not the case with the military - it makes perfect sense they would be the ones funding this, as they are regularly sending home guys with fewer limbs than they went out with.

I think they should be funding this - they owe it to their disabled veterans.

Re: Paralyzed Woman Controls Robotic Arm With Her Mind

#35

Post by InclinedPlane » Thu, May 17, 2012, 11:48 PM UTC

johnpaulhayes wrote: post #25

kevinalexbrown wrote: post #6

Disclaimer: I work in a similar lab (my adviser was advised by the senior author on the paper, who runs the lab) on a brain-machine interface project funded by DARPA. What makes this awesome from a scientific point of view: 1) 2-dimensional decoders, where an individual controls a mouse with their mind, have existed for a while. What makes this really cool is that there are actually quite a few degrees of freedom in…

No doubt this is amazing. But a question strikes me... why is a military organisation funding this research? By their very nature, are they not in the business of disabling enemies (a.k.a people)? Just strikes me as odd but I can see the potential of weaponizing this technology.

DARPA has always engaged in long-range seemingly "blue sky" research. They've pioneered autonomously driven vehicles and they invented the internet. To some degree they recognize that pushing the envelope will result in related breakthroughs that are imminently practical.

Militarily the primary goal is likely improving the lives of soldiers who have been maimed and dismembered in battle. This is even more of a concern today because the improvements in battlefield medicine have resulted in more and more soldiers surviving with wounds that previously would have been fatal, leading to more veterans with very serious disabilities.

Certainly there is a potential to weaponize this technology but you have to keep in mind the reasons why that's not such a big concern at least in the near-term. First, this requires pretty invasive brain surgery. Second, it has a fairly low success rate at the moment. Third, the amount of control available is significantly diminished compared to functional nerves and muscles. Overall there aren't any good reasons why you would want to try to switch to using a system like this for controlling a tank or a fighter jet, so it's questionable what sort of battlefield potential the technology has now. When we get to the point where these systems can match flesh and blood then that will change, but that's a much larger can of worms than merely military applications.