[HN Gopher] Affordable device will let anyone connect their brai...
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Affordable device will let anyone connect their brain to a computer
Author : Mark_Frenk
Score : 42 points
Date : 2023-03-19 17:26 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.vice.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.vice.com)
| Mark_Frenk wrote:
| https://www.crowdsupply.com/hackerbci/pieeg all details about the
| project here
| bckr wrote:
| Including the crowdfunding campaign which as of now is about
| 1200 shy of its goal
| Mark_Frenk wrote:
| started few days ago only
| throwanem wrote:
| I don't like seeing no mention of electrical safety in the
| description of a device like this.
| OJFord wrote:
| 1) 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.
| sizzzzlerz wrote:
| Something like this, I imagine:
|
| https://trekmovie.com/2007/06/07/we-have-found-spocks-braint...
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| The most efficient device to connect your brain to a computer is
| surprisingly affordable and pretty commonplace: the keyboard.
| Mark_Frenk wrote:
| https://github.com/HackerBCI/EEGwithRaspberryPI
| Mark_Frenk wrote:
| https://www.crowdsupply.com/hackerbci/pieeg
| [deleted]
| pedalpete wrote:
| I 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 (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-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, we're using neurofeedback during sleep
| to increase the efficiency of deep sleep.
| korijn wrote:
| SoundMind 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)?
| Mark_Frenk wrote:
| thank you!!! great comment
| zamnos wrote:
| > 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.
| smadge wrote:
| Is it a keyboard and mouse?
| highwaylights wrote:
| Between 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 wrote:
| Wow
| dinosaurdynasty wrote:
| I'm hoping for mind uploading... my body sucks, I crave the
| power of bits
| jonnycomputer wrote:
| I 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).
| smoldesu wrote:
| What's a computer?
| Mark_Frenk wrote:
| For RaspberryPi
| tomohelix wrote:
| Well 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.
| chaosbolt wrote:
| The 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?
| tomohelix wrote:
| I really doubt that. Do you type as fast as you can think?
| As in the moment a line of code formed in your brain it got
| typed out immediately into the computer? Maybe you can but
| I don't think the majority of people can do that.
| iforgotpassword wrote:
| It's usually only those short bursts, usually you spend
| more time thinking than typing, but maybe for some
| languages where you write a lot of boilerplate all the
| time it's different.
| chaosbolt wrote:
| Exactly, plus all 3 comments assumed I talked about my
| input into the computer, while I talked about how much
| info I can take into my brain from the computer being
| already too fast, who cares if it takes me 2 seconds to
| write a sentence I thought about for a minute or
| instantly, the thinking will always be slower and the
| reading is fast enough as is.
|
| The issue facing us is on a genetic level, most people
| are too dumb to even profit from the current input/output
| speed, let alone making x4 faster.
| melling wrote:
| We need to have this conversation every few years because
| developers fancy themselves as efficient code monkeys.
|
| The downside is that many develop RSI from a keyboard and
| mouse.
|
| https://www.slideserve.com/carrington/repetitive-strain-
| inju...
|
| It's discussed on HN from time to time:
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?q=rsi
| nine_k wrote:
| When playing a musical instrument, humans usually transmit
| an order of magnitude more information through the
| instrument than they do when they type on the keyboard.
| This involves not only a higher tempo, but also the
| meaningful timing, key velocity / wind instrument blowing
| intensity, etc. Same applies to e.g. a plane pilot doing a
| complex maneuver, or even a player of a fast-paced game,
| computer or not.
|
| Humans definitely can output more than the keyboard
| currently allows, and _likely_ this can be used somehow
| beneficially. The output need not be all verbal though.
| civilian wrote:
| have you tried these EEG-based tools? They're difficult to
| pick up.
| charcircuit wrote:
| Have you used any BCI text input methods? I can assure you
| that typing with a keyboard is much faster and accurate than
| a "direct interface."
| amelius wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| Yes, 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.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| Where did you get 3-4 times?
| tomohelix wrote:
| Just a rough guess from the diameter of the brain and the
| nerve distance between the brain and your finger muscles.
| jonnycomputer wrote:
| Flagged. Knew I should have left out the Apple bit.
| dang wrote:
| It wasn't flagged because of the Apple bit. I flagged and
| collapsed it because it was an offtopic distraction. I'm sure
| your intent was good but it's extremely easy for something
| like this to take over a thread, and indeed that was just
| what was happening.
| jonnycomputer wrote:
| Thanks for the explanation dang.
| incone123 wrote:
| Optimistic take: this might drive innovation and bring down
| price of access for people with disabilities.
| JoeDaDude wrote:
| So, it is something better than the Neurosky?
|
| https://store.neurosky.com/pages/mindwave
|
| While no longer available, the Neurosky was once sold for only
| $109.
| oori wrote:
| I 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.
| Mark_Frenk wrote:
| since chip-shortage, which price is it now?
| kfarr wrote:
| Tried that years ago and couldn't get it to recognize much,
| very noisy
| IIAOPSW wrote:
| finally, we can skip the middleman and just stimulate dopamine
| release directly.
| chaosbolt wrote:
| Yeah 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.
| boeingUH60 wrote:
| I can't wait till the time when people's brains are locked by
| hackers demanding ransom..
| Gys wrote:
| Or they go directly to your memory and retrieve all necessary
| info to access your accounts
| simonswords82 wrote:
| Impressive that you can remember all necessary info to access
| all your accounts in your head!
| Mark_Frenk wrote:
| it is only EEG signals, and application are very limited
| [deleted]
| jclulow wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| That's a horrific thought, wow.
| Mark_Frenk wrote:
| hm
| hsbauauvhabzb wrote:
| Only 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.
| mcshicks wrote:
| I'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 wrote:
| but PiEEG it is open-source! project, is it important ?
| ThrowawayTestr wrote:
| What have you been doing with your headset?
| mcshicks wrote:
| Recording meditation sessions. I played around with one I
| borrowed from somebody in 2015 but it was just unreliable for
| longer 30 minute sessions. It's come a long way in terms of
| third party software and tutorials on removing artifacts from
| the data. There is a phone app mind monitor that makes it
| very easy to look at frequency domain data and make
| recordings which you can import into tools like eeglab.
| Mark_Frenk wrote:
| thank you!
| [deleted]
| ccooffee wrote:
| This 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.)
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