Why brain-computer interface?

MindMeetsMachine - this was the first idea for this blog's title, but because human minds are much more similar than we expect someone already thought of it before. But the idea remains the same and this sums up exactly what brain-compute interface (shortened BCI) is: a connection point for human mind and machines.

Why is that important?
From my  point of view that is very important and will affect us all in the future. Maybe it is not too visible right now, but if you look at the way technology evolves every year you will realize it is closer than you thought. What got me thinking more and more about the area of brain-computer interfaces was one article a colleague of mine shared on a social network. It was a research project from University of Washington called "Direct Brain-2-Brain Communication in Humans: A Pilot Study", that had as an objective the transmission of information directly from one brain to another. The result of the pilot study showed that it is possible to perform brain-to-brain communication, one of the researcher being able to move a finger of the other one. Even though there were a lot of speculation afterwards regarding the correctness of the study, it made me think about the possible consequences of such a study. What happens if it falls in the wrong hands? How can we control it? You may think that it is highly unlikely since you will have to have those helmets and all the wires, but you have to consider that this is only the beginning and with devices such as smartphones or even Google Glass you will always have something close to your head. Hacking such devices proved to be possible in the past so a reason for concern it is justifiable.

However, we should not ignore so many positive aspects of the brain computer interfaces and the fact that they can actually save lives in the medical area. In future posts I will talk about different kind of applications using BCI, but mostly about the effort of standardization in this field.

TOBI  is one of the most important projects in the area of BCI standardization. TOBI group is an European Uninon research projects and among its partners we can find a significant number of European Universities and clinical academies. Their goal was to produce a standard for interoperability between BCI and acquisition equipment, between BCIs themselves or BCIs and applications as well as producing different protocols for network communications and standardize the syntax and semantics of commands used for these protocols.

Hope I  made you think about the importance of BCI and you will follow my future posts to find out more about the TOBI standard.

References:

•  brain2brain: http://homes.cs.washington.edu/~rao/brain2brain/experiment.html
• TOBI project: http://www.tobi-project.org/