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 a robot arm, but they're basically using the same hardware. So the influence of software/algorithms in this case is pretty fundamental. There are a lot of papers on improved neural-decoding methods that at first glance appear really dry, boring, not the `sexy' kind of science with huge breakthroughs, but they end up being crucial to good performance as the complexity of the robot grows.
2) One participant was implanted with the electrode array 5 years before the study, and had the injury 10 years before that. Usually the signals don't last that long in monkey models. And we know that your cortex changes with disuse, so it's awesome that they were able to get usable signals so many years later.
What needs to get better are a couple things:
First, these decoders aren't perfect yet. What the Wired article didn't tell you is that the performance for the woman's implant was around 20-50% successful trials (still awesome from a comparison to no interaction)[1].
Second, incorporating sensory feedback is another challenge that is really hard to address, but also very important. Imagine building a robotic controller in which the only information you received about the robot's position was visual. That's the way this works. If we find a reasonable way to mimic sensors of muscle extension (a proxy for joint angle) then we can create more controllable devices.
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 from hot to cold and back again.
2) Electrodes. This is difficult because skin conditions change. There is [from what we've looked at] a smallish envelope between "I can feel this" and "this is potentially dangerous". The envelope can change with skin conditions [and people]. I've built a little prototype that sits on my tongue and gives me feedback, but that is clunky, and something we'd like to avoid.
3) Vibration. The problem here is that it turns out that it's a bit tough to judge different levels of vibration. It ends up as an on/off sensation. What we've talked about is using different patters of on off, or a variable frequency of on-off. (Here is one of the motors walking through the different freqs. It sounds kindof funny: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_bGb2Xij8I&feature=youtu...)
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There is a ton of interest in this stuff, at least in my circle.
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)
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 .
Ah man, I sorry, but I have to rip in to you now...
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.
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.
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.
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 a robot arm, but they're basically using the same hardware. So the influence of software/algorithms in this case is pretty fundamental. There are a lot of papers on improved neural-decoding methods that at first glance appear really dry, boring, not the `sexy' kind of science with huge breakthroughs, but they end up being crucial to good performance as the complexity of the robot grows.
2) One participant was implanted with the electrode array 5 years before the study, and had the injury 10 years before that. Usually the signals don't last that long in monkey models. And we know that your cortex changes with disuse, so it's awesome that they were able to get usable signals so many years later.
What needs to get better are a couple things:
First, these decoders aren't perfect yet. What the Wired article didn't tell you is that the performance for the woman's implant was around 20-50% successful trials (still awesome from a comparison to no interaction)[1].
Second, incorporating sensory feedback is another challenge that is really hard to address, but also very important. Imagine building a robotic controller in which the only information you received about the robot's position was visual. That's the way this works. If we find a reasonable way to mimic sensors of muscle extension (a proxy for joint angle) then we can create more controllable devices.
[1] http://www.nature.com/news/mind-controlled-robot-arms-show-p...