You might soon be able to control your electronic devices using only your mind.
Engineers have designed a brain implant that could detect neural impulses and wirelessly communicate those signals with electronics such as a computer or smart home device.
A recent study published in the journal Nature Electronics shows that scientists are one step closer to an invention that would allow people to control their smart devices and connect to the internet from anywhere they are.
“Our group at Purdue University has been working in the area of electric field communication around the human body for the past eight years and pioneering technologies such as EQS-HBC [electro-quasistatic human body communication], which is now being commercialized,” Shreyas Sen, the principal investigator for the study, told Tech Xplore.
These technologies could also potentially advance both human capabilities as well as medical practices.
“This technology, when combined with further advancements in deep-brain wireless power transfer, would make it possible to gain fundamental insights into disorders like Parkinson’s disease, Tourette syndrome, epilepsy, depression, anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder,” Baibhab Chatterjee, who led this work as a doctoral student at Purdue and is now on the faculty of the University of Florida in Gainesville, said.
Using a two-step process called biphasic quasistatic brain communication that slowly unfolds in the brain, scientists at Purdue University created a brain implant smaller than a dime that could sense and transmit data to a pair of headphones, and unlike current brain chips, there’s no need to connect this one to a computer or any other device.
“Quasistatic” is the term that indicates the neural signal is operating at a relatively low level.
“Through this exercise, we learned that similar to the communication of body-generated ECG [electrocardiogram] signals through the body, we can send digital information through the tissue using various technologies, some of which we have patented,” Sen said.
There have previously been many trials to link neural signals to an external device, such as over-the-ear headphones, but this research is the first to reveal high-bandwidth wireless communication with the implants.
To insert the device, doctors removed the skin over the skull and performed a bilateral craniotomy — a surgical removal of part of the bone from the skull, exposing the brain, according to Johns Hopkins Medicine.
Doctors then thinned down the midline skull to improve connection with the implant, which, like Elon Musk’s Neuralink that uses electrodes for connection, is untethered to the brain.
Internal communications are innately supported by the human body from the generation of tiny electrical signals, which form a “broadband” channel across the body. The “brainternet” interface will allow high bandwidth interactions between these signals and computers.
“Once our electric-field-based communication technology was mature around the body, it became an obvious choice for us to conduct this investigation, as it is also applicable inside the brain, for high bandwidth ultra-low power implant-to-computer communication,” Sen explained.
“With this invention, the human brain ‘gets its own broadband,’ ” Sen added. “Most notably, we found that electric field-based communication in the brain provides an extremely high bandwidth and moderate loss channel for high-speed communication between implants and wearables directly.”
“The bandwidths achievable are significantly higher than existing optical, magnetic, ultrasound or radio frequency-based technologies.”
However, the current research is just an outline and further research will need to be conducted to confirm potential and assess compatibility with existing neural implants.
“Another area that we are actively working on is improving the power-transfer efficiency and reduce leakage in such implants,” Chatterjee shared. “At the same time, we are looking into various translatable applications of this technique for central as well as peripheral nervous systems.”
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