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Affordable device will let anyone connect their brain to a computer
- Mark_Frenk 4y agohttps://www.crowdsupply.com/hackerbci/pieeg https://www.crowdsupply.com/hackerbci/pieeg
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- boeingUH60 4y agoI can't wait till the time when people's brains are locked by hackers demanding ransom..
- Gys 4y agoOr they go directly to your memory and retrieve all necessary info to access your accounts
- simonswords82 4y agoImpressive that you can remember all necessary info to access all your accounts in your head!
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- Mark_Frenk 4y agoit is only EEG signals, and application are very limited
- jclulow 4y agoI assume that will come well after Amazon uses the technology to remove the memory of rights holder content when you cancel your Prime subscription. Or after Disney uses it to retroactively edit the Star Wars movies for the nineteenth time, digitally gaslighting people by amending the original memories in place.
- mostlysimilar 4y agoThat's a horrific thought, wow.
- Mark_Frenk 4y agohm
- hsbauauvhabzb 4y agoOnly those who own a subscription, there will always be the ones that can’t or won’t pay fines related to piracy activities the retrospective thought analyser scan identified, or those whose current thoughts and opinions don’t align with Disneys core values.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- jonnycomputer 4y agoI connect my brain to computers everyday using a keyboard and monitor. The entire loop consists with photons emitted from monitor hitting my eye-balls, being processed by my visual system, etc. you know "brain stuff", and then my responding to that by using my fingers to press "keys" on a keyboard and to move around an optical "mouse" to send signals to the computer. It actually works quite well, and is quite affordable (unless its an Apple Studio Display, those are ridiculously expensive).
- tomohelix 4y agoWell you jest but the benefit of a direct interface is how much faster it can be. Typing is slow. Chemical based signals from eyes to brain to muscle are slow. Moving the mouse and keyboard are slow. All those middlemen can be removed and we can speed things up at least 3-4 times.
- civilian 4y agohave you tried these EEG-based tools? They're difficult to pick up.
- amelius 4y ago> Chemical based signals from eyes to brain to muscle are slow Uh, these are the same types of signals that are happening inside the brain ...
- tomohelix 4y agoYes, but I am talking about the parts outside the brain. Eye to brain. Brain to muscle. You can cut those out and since the brain is about 15cm in diameter while there are around 50cm of nerves between your fingers and brain, I think around 3-4x faster by replacing those nerves with near lightspeed communication is not too ambitious.
- chaosbolt 4y agoThe way I use the mouse and keyboard makes this already too fast and I find myself in need to slow down how fast I take information in anyway. What makes you think people can handle it being 4 times faster? The bottleneck will eventually be your neurotransmitters no?
- IIAOPSW 4y agofinally, we can skip the middleman and just stimulate dopamine release directly.
- chaosbolt 4y agoYeah imagine the anticompetitive laws in marketing and the free will questions we'll ask then? Something like Burger king suing mcdonalds for showing you a bicmac and releasing dopamine x1000 times not because it's weird (-er than today's ads) but because mcdonalds did it first.
- sizzzzlerz 4y agoSomething like this, I imagine: https://trekmovie.com/2007/06/07/we-have-found-spocks-brainthe-preview/ https://trekmovie.com/2007/06/07/we-have-found-spocks-braint...
- Mark_Frenk 4y agohttps://www.crowdsupply.com/hackerbci/pieeg https://www.crowdsupply.com/hackerbci/pieeg all details about the project here
- bckr 4y agoIncluding the crowdfunding campaign which as of now is about 1200 shy of its goal
- Mark_Frenk 4y agostarted few days ago only
- JoeDaDude 4y agoSo, it is something better than the Neurosky? https://store.neurosky.com/pages/mindwave https://store.neurosky.com/pages/mindwave While no longer available, the Neurosky was once sold for only $109.
- Mark_Frenk 4y agosince chip-shortage, which price is it now?
- kfarr 4y agoTried that years ago and couldn’t get it to recognize much, very noisy
- oori 4y agoI have a bunch of devices (off the shelf, and custom built) and built neuro-experiences used by thousands of people. Neurosky is by far the worst. It’s nearly random. From the low cost devices, Muse (1 or 2) is by far the best. UX, wearability, comfort, electric signal.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y agoThe most efficient device to connect your brain to a computer is surprisingly affordable and pretty commonplace: the keyboard.
- borissk 4y agoKeyboard and mouse are the opposite of efficient - they are an extremely slow interface. Let's say you saw a person and want to transfer his image from your brain to a computer - how long would that take with a keyboard and mouse. An efficient brain computer interface should be able to do it in a second.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- icandoit 4y agoI just did a search on "blind person using computer" most used keyboards, some also used voice tools built into the OS. Whats the throughput on existing B2C tools? I see research but not anything I can buy right now. Actualy, if you receive input data faster than you can process and think, wouldn't that in effect just be a program telling you what to think and do? You could resist, but not be able to independently decide what to do anymore than if a room full of people were shouting at you 24/7.
- mcshicks 4y agoI've been connecting a raspberry pi to a muse headset using the muselsl python library. But that only has 4 channels vs 8 for this one. I bought a muse about a year ago used for $125 on ebay, this board is $350 and you would still need to buy the electrodes and make a headset. I think the price is fair and it seems pretty competitive with openbci boards, but I think if you really wanted to just get started you could get going with a muse for a lot less and a lot quicker. The muse is finicky to get good connections, but I don't have any reason to believe it would be that much better with my own homemade headset with dry connections. Also it says for safety reasons you have to run the pi on a 5V battery which might not run all that long depending upon the size of the battery and which pi you are using.
- Mark_Frenk 4y agothank you!
- Mark_Frenk 4y agobut PiEEG it is open-source! project, is it important ?
- svnt 4y agoThe sad reality is that the open-source nature of this project adds less information to the world than the reference design documentation by Texas Instruments that you can download from their website.
- Mark_Frenk 4y agoTexas Instruments also can provide and gerbers files for produce PCB boards? Also software to read data and signal processing? No Datasets etc NO
- svnt 4y agoYes: Gerbers: https://e2e.ti.com/support/data-converters-group/data-converters/f/data-converters-forum/889859/ads1299eegfe-pdk-pcb-layout-files-request https://e2e.ti.com/support/data-converters-group/data-conver... Firmware: https://www.ti.com/tool/ADS1299EEGFE-PDK https://www.ti.com/tool/ADS1299EEGFE-PDK You are just making money selling $60 parts you bought too many of for $350.
- throwanem 4y agoI don't like seeing no mention of electrical safety in the description of a device like this.
- OJFord 4y ago1) it's going to be what 3-5v at some low power capability; 2) this is just a processing unit I think, no electrodes or whatever the sensors are called that actually connect to you. Seems about as dangerous to me as (some kind of readout device that connects to) a finger-clip pulse oximeter.
- throwanem 4y agoThe device connects directly to EEG electrodes, which means that in the presence of a sufficiently severe failure it could potentially drive current across the brain. There's also no obvious galvanic isolation (transformers, etc., like an Ethernet PHY) in the pictured design, which is especially concerning since it means the device could potentially provide a path to ground (again, through the brain!) in the case of a miswired or damaged appliance exposing mains voltage - which sounds like a rare concern, but has actually happened to me once; I was fortunate that the consequent cross-chest shock was only deeply unpleasant, and not lethal, which it easily might have been if I hadn't broken the connection by falling over. At an absolute minimum, I'd expect to see clear warnings to only use this device while it was powered from battery and with no wired connections to a power supply or to any other device plugged into the mains. In that condition, it should be relatively safe; in any other, I wouldn't think of using it and would recommend no one else do, either.
- Mark_Frenk 4y agohttps://github.com/HackerBCI/EEGwithRaspberryPI https://github.com/HackerBCI/EEGwithRaspberryPI
- smadge 4y agoIs it a keyboard and mouse?
- ccooffee 4y agoThis is still specialist/amateur grade stuff (requiring you to build/maintain/debug the system yourself). I'm optimistic about the technology continuing to develop and eventually becoming mainstream. Having a robust alternative to keyboard-and-mouse interactions will (hopefully) improve accessibility of software. (Though I have difficulty imagining that BCI input devices will be easier to support than today's complicated accessibility approaches, like screen-reader compatibility.)
- highwaylights 4y agoBetween this, the leaps VR is making (e.g. PSVR 2) and the rapid advancement of LLMs, I feel like we’re all working our way towards the gloop tanks from the first Matrix film - except in the real world we’re spending a lot of money and effort to get there on purpose.
- Mark_Frenk 4y agoWow
- dinosaurdynasty 4y agoI'm hoping for mind uploading... my body sucks, I crave the power of bits
- highwaylights 4y agoEven if you could upload your whole conscious mind to a machine, is it still you? I often think about this in the concept of teleporters from Star Trek. When they beam the away team down did they really send those people somewhere or just incinerate them and create clones in another place?
- dinosaurdynasty 4y agoI'm sure you could Ship of Theseus it (upload a % of your mind at a time)
- mxkopy 4y ago100% this, I think the key to doing this successfully lies in replacing your mind as you stop using it (i.e. as you're going to sleep)
- andai 4y agoI read a great essay about that a few years ago. The thought experiment went like this: imagine a universe in which a machine scans your atoms one by one, transmits the data wirelessly to Mars, and rebuilds you there, atom by atom. Does your consciousness "jump" to the new body, or do you just die? * What if the scanner is able to scan you without destroying the original body? What if you accidentally arrive in two destinations? etc... * Another fascinating question is, we'll assume the new body will be just as conscious as you were. Where does its consciousness "come" from? From its point of view, it was in the teleporter on Earth one moment, and on Mars the next! I thought the video game SOMA did a nice job exploring this area.
- zamnos 4y ago> they were able to control toy mice by blinking, for example. Anyone who's tried a neurosky knows that blinking is super obvious when looking at the graphs because of the electrical action motivating the muscles which results in that blink. The problem is that doesn't extrapolate to anything else - training yourself to move that third arm you never had is actually really hard, if not impossible.
- pedalpete 4y agoI have a bit of experience in this space as we're making a sleep EEG device to improve the efficiency of deep sleep. The hardware is one of the easier parts to build for an EEG system. Along with this device, you could also buy a very similar device from https://openbci.com https://openbci.com (about $1000 for 12 channel, $400 for 4 channel). The challenge in letting "anyone connect their brain to a computer" is in the electrode design and comfort/weirdness of the device. First you've just got the dry electrodes, which can be expensive, and in many designs (Muse S) wear over time, requiring replacement headbands. Many devices try going for the through hair electrode design, which is challenging for people with lots of hair, or curly afros (like myself). Once you've got your electrodes figured out, then you have to figure out how to keep them in place, comfortably, over an extended period of time. Ok, so you've got that sorted, now get that into a form factor a person will be happy to wear. We are starting to see in-ear EEG devices built into headphones like the Emotiv Mn8 (https://www.emotiv.com/workplace-wellness-safety-and-productivity-mn8 https://www.emotiv.com/workplace-wellness-safety-and-product...). However, even in these locations the electrodes are going to be sensitive to movement. So great it you are sitting still at work, but what are you really trying to accomplish. So that's all the bad news. The good news is that with the low cost and experimentation that is happening in this space, I suspect we are going to learn more about the brain in the next 10 years than we have in the last 50. It is becoming easier to watch the brain and learn more about it's functioning. Many people ask what the benefit of a BCI device is. Unlike fitness monitors, which are giving users data, I believe the near future of BCI is in neurofeedback. We're seeing a bunch of development from different start-ups (a bunch in Sydney, AUS - so reach out if you're local) that are looking at neurofeedback for treatment of psychological disorders. At https://soundmind.co https://soundmind.co, we're using neurofeedback during sleep to increase the efficiency of deep sleep.
- Mark_Frenk 4y agothank you!!! great comment
- korijn 4y agoSoundMind product is fascinating. Is there a risk you become dependent on the device after longer term use and will have worse than pre-soundmind sleep when you have to go without it (e.g. it breaks or any other arbitrary reason)?
- gumby 4y agoI was hoping this would be an article about keyboards. (Worked briefly on brain-computer interfaces at MIT in the early 80s)
- KRAKRISMOTT 4y agoThe author built the hardware equivalent of a toy/gimmick. In software terms, this is a quick script/widget under a hundred lines of code. The chip is over ten years old and technology has improved a lot more. Four thousand dollars is not a feasible amount to manufacture any significant quantities of hardware (it's barely enough budget to do a prototype). 40 thousand and a high end FPGA or a more up to date amplifier mounted on a shield would be a lot better for this application.
- hulitu 4y ago> Affordable device will let anyone connect their brain to a computer Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated. Wait, Microsoft, Google and they "partners" already know everything i think of.
- GoblinSlayer 4y agoIt's for your safety: google will warn you about erroneous thoughts.
- The28thDuck 4y agoYeah - it’s called a mouse.