Brain-Machine Interface
Brain-Machine Interface is a type of technology that establishes communication between the biological brain with an external device, allowing the user to interface with said devices using only neurological input. While this technology has made tremendous breakthroughs from cochlear implants to neuro-prosthetics, it also raises an array of ethical issues as these devices will gather data that is on a whole new level of intimacy of the user.
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History
1924
A German neuroscientist, Hans Berger, discovers that the human brain gives off electrical signals. He successfully measured this electrical activity and observed different patterns in the electrical waves depending on what tasks the brain was carrying out
Applications of BMI
The human brain consists of billions of neurons that are connected to one another via axon and dendrites. These neurons produces electrical signals that passes through other neurons to eventually control every voluntary action of the human body. BMI takes advantages of this by relaying the electrical signal from the neurons to an external machine which then interprets the signal.
Neural Prosthetics
One prominent application of BMI technology is in neural prosthetics, which has revolutionized the field of prosthetics. Traditionally, patients who needed prosthetics for variety of reasons were unable to regain full range of movement and dexterity due to standard prosthetics being quite rigid and unsophisticated in possible movements. With neural prosthetics, the prosthetics are no longer just a hunk of material, instead it consists of hundreds of motors, actuators and sensors that allow wide range of motion in places such as the fingers as well as knees and ankles. On top of this biomechanics support, neural prothesis receives and interprets electrical motor signals from the brain, and carries out specific movements that would have happened with the original biological limbs. Due to this, it only takes matter of minutes for someone to get used to this brain to prosthetics communications before they can start moving their prosthetics naturally.
