8/16/2011 PERMALINK
Wearware brain-computer interface. Research conducted by Professor Todd Coleman at the University of California, San Diego has demonstrated that a thin flexible, skin-like device, mounted with tiny electronic components, is capable of acquiring electrical signals from the brain and skeletal muscles and potentially transmitting the information wirelessly to an external computer. 'The development opens up a slew of previously unimaginable possibilities in the field of brain-machine interfaces well beyond biomedical applications,' said Professor Coleman of UCSD's Department of Bioengineering in the Jacobs School of Engineering. The new device eliminates the clunky, artificial coupling previously required by brain/computer interfaces and other types of body monitoring wearware. 'The brain-machine interface paradigm is very exciting and I think it need not be limited to thinking about prosthetics or people with some type of motor deficit,' said Coleman. 'You could evolve a very nice coupling that is remarkably natural and almost ubiquitous. That is what really fascinates me – really the coupling between the biological system and the computer system.'