A braincomputer interface (BCI), sometimes called a direct neural interface or a brain machine interface (BMI), is a direct communication pathway

between the brain and an external device. BCIs are often aimed at assisting, augmenting, or repairing human cognitive or sensorymotor functions. Research on BCIs began in the 1970s at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) under a grant from the National Science Foundation, followed by a contract from DARPA.[1][2] The papers published after this research also mark the first appearance of the expression brain computer interface in scientific literature. The field of BCI research and development has since focused primarily on neuroprosthetics applications that aim at restoring damaged hearing, sight and movement. Thanks to the remarkable cortical plasticity of the brain, signals from implanted prostheses can, after adaptation, be handled by the brain like natural sensor or effector channels.[3] Following years of animal experimentation, the first neuroprosthetic devices implanted in humans appeared in the mid-1990s. he history of braincomputer interfaces (BCIs) starts with Hans Berger's discovery of the electrical activity of human brain and the development of electroencephalography (EEG). In 1924 Berger was the first one who recorded an EEG from a human brain. By analyzing EEGs, Berger was able to identify waves or rhythms which are present in a brain, as the Alpha Wave (812 Hz), also known as Berger's Wave. Berger's first recording device was very rudimentary. He inserted silver wires under the scalp of his patients. Those were replaced by silver foils which were attached to the patients head by rubber bandages later on. Berger connected these sensors to a Lippmann capillary electrometer, with disappointing results. More sophisticated measuring devices such as the Siemens double-coil recording galvanometer, which displayed electric voltages as small as one ten thousandth of a volt, led to success. Berger analyzed the interrelation of alternations in his EEG wave diagrams with brain diseases. EEGs permitted completely new possibilities for the research of Human brain activities.

[edit] BCI versus neuroprosthetics

Main article: Neuroprosthetics Neuroprosthetics is an area of neuroscience concerned with neural prosthesesusing artificial devices to replace the function of impaired nervous systems and brain related problems or sensory organs. The most widely used neuroprosthetic device is the cochlear implant, which, as of 2006, has been implanted in approximately 100,000 people worldwide.[4] There are also several neuroprosthetic devices that aim to restore vision, including retinal implants. The differences between BCIs and neuroprosthetics are mostly in the ways the terms are used: neuroprosthetics typically connect the nervous system to a device, whereas BCIs usually connect

the brain (or nervous system) with a computer system. Practical neuroprosthetics can be linked to any part of the nervous systemfor example, peripheral nerveswhile the term "BCI" usually designates a narrower class of systems which interface with the central nervous system. The terms are sometimes used interchangeably. Neuroprosthetics and BCIs seek to achieve the same aims, such as restoring sight, hearing, movement, ability to communicate, and even cognitive function. Both use similar experimental methods and surgical techniques
Animal bci research

Several laboratories have managed to record signals from monkey and rat cerebral cortices to operate BCIs to carry out movement. Monkeys have navigated computer cursors on screen and commanded robotic arms to perform simple tasks simply by thinking about the task and without any motor output.[5] In May 2008 photographs that showed a monkey operating a robotic arm with its mind at the Pittsburgh University Medical Center were published in a number of well known science journals and magazines.[6] Other research on cats has decoded visual signals.
[edit] Early work

Monkey operating a robotic arm with braincomputer interfacing (Schwartz lab, University of Pittsburgh)

The operant conditioning studies of Fetz and colleagues first showed that monkeys could learn to control the deflection of a biofeedback meter arm with neural activity.[7] Such work in the 1970s established that monkeys could quickly learn to voluntarily control the firing rates of individual and multiple neurons in the primary motor cortex if they were rewarded for generating appropriate patterns of neural activity.[8] Studies that developed algorithms to reconstruct movements from motor cortex neurons, which control movement, date back to the 1970s. In the 1980s, Apostolos Georgopoulos at Johns Hopkins University found a mathematical relationship between the electrical responses of single motor-cortex neurons in rhesus macaque monkeys and the direction that monkeys moved their arms (based on a cosine function). He also found that dispersed groups of neurons in different areas of the brain collectively controlled motor commands but was only able to record the firings of neurons in one area at a time because of technical limitations imposed by his equipment.[9]

There has been rapid development in BCIs since the mid-1990s.[10] Several groups have been able to capture complex brain motor centre signals using recordings from neural ensembles (groups of neurons) and use these to control external devices, including research groups led by Richard Andersen, John Donoghue, Phillip Kennedy, Miguel Nicolelis, and Andrew Schwartz.
[edit] Prominent research successes

In 1999, researchers led by Yang Dan at University of California, Berkeley decoded neuronal firings to reproduce images seen by cats. The team used an array of electrodes embedded in the thalamus (which integrates all of the brains sensory input) of sharp-eyed cats. Researchers targeted 177 brain cells in the thalamus lateral geniculate nucleus area, which decodes signals from the retina. The cats were shown eight short movies, and their neuron firings were recorded. Using mathematical filters, the researchers decoded the signals to generate movies of what the cats saw and were able to reconstruct recognizable scenes and moving objects.[11] Similar results in humans have since been achieved by researchers in Japan (see below). Miguel Nicolelis has been a prominent proponent of using multiple electrodes spread over a greater area of the brain to obtain neuronal signals to drive a BCI. Such neural ensembles are said to reduce the variability in output produced by single electrodes, which could make it difficult to operate a BCI. After conducting initial studies in rats during the 1990s, Nicolelis and his colleagues developed BCIs that decoded brain activity in owl monkeys and used the devices to reproduce monkey movements in robotic arms. Monkeys have advanced reaching and grasping abilities and good hand manipulation skills, making them ideal test subjects for this kind of work. By 2000, the group succeeded in building a BCI that reproduced owl monkey movements while the monkey operated a joystick or reached for food.[12] The BCI operated in real time and could also control a separate robot remotely over Internet protocol. But the monkeys could not see the arm moving and did not receive any feedback, a so-called open-loop BCI.
Human bci research Invasive BCI research has targeted repairing damaged sight and providing new functionality to persons with paralysis. Invasive BCIs are implanted directly into the grey matter of the brain during neurosurgery. As they rest in the grey matter, invasive devices produce the highest quality signals of BCI devices but are prone to scar-tissue build-up, causing the signal to become weaker or even lost as the body reacts to a foreign object in the brain.

In vision science, direct brain implants have been used to treat non-congenital (acquired) blindness. One of the first scientists to come up with a working brain interface to restore sight was private researcher William Dobelle. Dobelle's first prototype was implanted into "Jerry", a man blinded in adulthood, in 1978. A single-array BCI containing 68 electrodes was implanted onto Jerrys visual cortex and

succeeded in producing phosphenes, the sensation of seeing light. The system included cameras mounted on glasses to send signals to the implant. Initially, the implant allowed Jerry to see shades of grey in a limited field of vision at a low frame-rate. This also required him to be hooked up to a two-ton mainframe, but shrinking electronics and faster computers made his artificial eye more portable and now enable him to perform simple tasks unassisted.[23] In 2002, Jens Naumann, also blinded in adulthood, became the first in a series of 16 paying patients to receive Dobelles second generation implant, marking one of the earliest commercial uses of BCIs. The second generation device used a more sophisticated implant enabling better mapping of phosphenes into coherent vision. Phosphenes are spread out across the visual field in what researchers call the starry-night effect. Immediately after his implant, Jens was able to use his imperfectly restored vision to drive slowly around the parking area of the research institute. BCIs focusing on motor neuroprosthetics aim to either restore movement in individuals with paralysis or provide devices to assist them, such as interfaces with computers or robot arms. Researchers at Emory University in Atlanta led by Philip Kennedy and Roy Bakay were first to install a brain implant in a human that produced signals of high enough quality to simulate movement. Their patient, Johnny Ray (19442002), suffered from locked-in syndrome after suffering a brain-stem stroke in 1997. Rays implant was installed in 1998 and he lived long enough to start working with the implant, eventually learning to control a computer cursor; he died in 2002 of a brain aneurysm.[24] Tetraplegic Matt Nagle became the first person to control an artificial hand using a BCI in 2005 as part of the first nine-month human trial of Cyberkinetics Neurotechnologys BrainGate chipimplant. Implanted in Nagles right precentral gyrus (area of the motor cortex for arm movement), the 96-electrode BrainGate implant allowed Nagle to control a robotic arm by thinking about moving his hand as well as a computer cursor, lights and TV.[25] One year later, professor Jonathan Wolpaw received the prize of the Altran Foundation for Innovation to develop a Brain Computer Interface with electrodes located on the surface of the skull, instead of directly in the brain.
[edit] Partially invasive BCIs

Partially invasive BCI devices are implanted inside the skull but rest outside the brain rather than within the grey matter. They produce better resolution signals than non-invasive BCIs where the bone tissue of the cranium deflects and deforms signals and have a lower risk of forming scartissue in the brain than fully invasive BCIs. Electrocorticography (ECoG) measures the electrical activity of the brain taken from beneath the skull in a similar way to non-invasive electroencephalography (see below), but the electrodes are embedded in a thin plastic pad that is placed above the cortex, beneath the dura mater.[26] ECoG technologies were first trialed in humans in 2004 by Eric Leuthardt and Daniel Moran from Washington University in St Louis. In a later trial, the researchers enabled a teenage boy to play Space Invaders using his ECoG implant.[27] This research indicates that control is rapid, requires

minimal training, and may be an ideal tradeoff with regards to signal fidelity and level of invasiveness. (Note: These electrodes were not implanted in the patients for BCI experiments. The patient was suffering from severe epilepsy and had the electrodes temporarily implanted to help his physicians localize seizure foci; the researchers simply took advantage of this.) Light Reactive Imaging BCI devices are still in the realm of theory. These would involve implanting a laser inside the skull. The laser would be trained on a single neuron and the neuron's reflectance measured by a separate sensor. When the neuron fires, the laser light pattern and wavelengths it reflects would change slightly. This would allow researchers to monitor single neurons but require less contact with tissue and reduce the risk of scar-tissue build-up. This signal can be either subdural or epidural, but is not taken from within the brain parenchyma itself. It has not been studied extensively until recently due to the limited access of subjects. Currently, the only manner to acquire the signal for study is through the use of patients requiring invasive monitoring for localization and resection of an epileptogenic focus. ECoG is a very promising intermediate BCI modality because it has higher spatial resolution, better signal-to-noise ratio, wider frequency range, and lesser training requirements than scalprecorded EEG, and at the same time has lower technical difficulty, lower clinical risk, and probably superior long-term stability than intracortical single-neuron recording. This feature profile and recent evidence of the high level of control with minimal training requirements shows potential for real world application for people with motor disabilities.
[edit] Non-invasive BCIs

As well as invasive experiments, there have also been experiments in humans using non-invasive neuroimaging technologies as interfaces. Signals recorded in this way have been used to power muscle implants and restore partial movement in an experimental volunteer. Although they are easy to wear, non-invasive implants produce poor signal resolution because the skull dampens signals, dispersing and blurring the electromagnetic waves created by the neurons. Although the waves can still be detected it is more difficult to determine the area of the brain that created them or the actions of individual neurons.
[edit] EEG