healthcare technology

Once, the prospect of manipulating the human mind with brain implants and radio beams ignited public fears that curtailed this line of research for decades. But now there is a resurgence using even more advanced technology. Laser beams, ultrasound, electromagnetic pulses, mild alternating and direct current stimulation and other methods now allow access to, and manipulation of, electrical activity in the brain with far more sophistication than the needlelike electrodes Manuel Rodriguez Delgado stabbed into brains.

 

Billionaires Elon Musk of Tesla and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook are leading the charge, pouring millions of dollars into developing brain-computer interface (BCI) technology. Musk says he wants to provide a “superintelligence layer” in the human brain to help protect us from artificial intelligence, and Zuckerberg reportedly wants users to upload their thoughts and emotions over the internet without the bother of typing.

 

But fact and fiction are easily blurred in these deliberations.

 

How does this technology actually work, and what is it capable of?

 

Today’s BCI devices work by analyzing data, in much the same way that Amazon tries to predict what book you might want next. Computers monitoring streams of electrical activity, picked up by a brain implant or a removable electrode cap, learn to recognize how the traffic pattern changes when a person makes an intended limb movement.

 

Advances in brain-computer interface technology are impressive, but we’re not close to anything resembling mind control.

 

read this excellent essay at https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-brain-computer-interface-technology-is-different-from-mind-control-20210517/

 

Deep learning is helping to make prosthetic arms behave more naturally.

 

 

Each year, more than 150,000 people have a limb amputated after an accident or for various medical reasons. Most people are then fitted with a prosthetic device that can recognize a limited number of signals to control a hand or foot, for example.

But Infinite Biomedical Technologies, a Baltimore startup company and another firm are taking advantage of better signal processing, pattern recognition software and other engineering advances to build new prosthetic controllers that might give amputees an easier life.

 

The key is boosting the amount of data the prosthetic arm can receive, and helping it interpret that information. “The goal for most patients is to get more than two functions, say open or close, or a wrist turn. Pattern recognition allows us to do that,” says Rahul Kaliki, CEO of Infinite. “We are now capturing more activity across the limb.”

 

Kaliki’s team of 14 employees are building the electronics that go inside other companies’ prosthetic arms. Infinite’s electronic control system, called Sense, records data from up to eight electrodes on his upper arm. Through many hours of training on the company’s tablet app, the device can detect the intent encoded in Rubin’s nerve signals when he moves his upper arm in a certain way. Sense then instructs his prosthetic hand to assume the appropriate grip.

 

read the original unedited story at  at https://www.wired.com/story/bionic-limbs-learn-to-open-a-beer/