Traces recorded from the scalps of four individuals using the BCI system to move a cursor from the centre of a computer screen to targets around the edge. The cursor paths are shown, with colour representing speed at each point, from slowest (blue) to fastest (red).

• Novel Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) provides communication for stroke, ALS victims without muscular control;

The Center’s BCI system has been proven to match the capabilities of costly invasive systems that require surgery to implant electrodes in the brain – and should be able to help individuals who have lost all muscular control, something other augmentative or assistive communications approaches such as eyeball-tracking systems cannot.

Cambridge Consultants helped the Wadsworth Center’s BCI group transform a brilliantly engineered and technically complex research system into an easy-to use, more portable system suitable for patients and their caregivers – at a fraction of the cost. Field testing of the enhanced BCI system began last month, with up to ten persons scheduled to receive the BCI system for use at home or in hospitals by June 2006. Most recent results with the BCI device will be presented at Northwestern University on April 5.

"Our device requires neither implanted electrodes nor eye movement to help severely paralyzed individuals to communicate," said Dr. Jonathan Wolpaw, director of the BCI unit of the Wadsworth Center. "We’re extremely grateful to Cambridge Consultants for helping us to make our technology more easily usable by non-technical caregivers outside a lab setting, with readily accessible PCs and components. We’re trying to take a solution that might cost tens of thousands of dollars and make it work better at a price of around $5000. We hope to be able to share more about our early patient studies shortly."

Brain Waves Alone Create Words – Not Muscles
For years brain-computer interface technology has excited researchers as a direct way to harness the human brain for controlling the body and the devices we manipulate. In the near term, this technology can give individuals suffering from conditions such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease) or brainstem strokes the ability to communicate with the world. These individuals face huge challenges in communicating and may even be entirely "locked in" to their bodies, possessing no muscle control of any type.

Future iterations of the BCI technology hold the potential for controlling medical devices such as wheelchairs and prosthetic limbs. There is also great interest in applications where streamlined communications are essential such as military pilots activating jet defensive mechanisms. The challenge has remained to deliver BCI systems that are accurate yet affordable and easy to use.

The Wadsworth Center’s BCI system consists of three primary hardware components and several pieces of specialized software. A mesh cap holds small sensor electrodes firmly against the user’s head. An amplifier is connected to the electrodes and is used to boost the minute analog signals (measured in microvolts) received from the surface of the scalp into a more robust signal which is then converted into a digital signal and analyzed by specially designed signal processing software running on a PC. Two monitors are connected to the PC, one for the caregiver interface and one for the user interface. The Wadsworth Center won the prestigious Altran Foundation for Innovation award in 2005 for its use of technology to overcome social exclusion. As part of the award, Cambridge Consultants, a company in the Altran group, is providing its expertise to the BCI group.

Patient Concentrates on a "Food" Icon and the Computer Senses it
Cambridge Consultants helped Dr. Wolpaw’s BCI Group transform its research-based system, with its inherently technically demanding interface, into a system capable of daily use by non-scientists. One of the hurdles included developing a sensor cap that was comfortable enough for extended wear yet allowed an untrained caregiver to position the sensors accurately on the head. Positioning deviations from session to session of more than a few millimeters can dramatically affect the accuracy of the system.

Cambridge Consultants is pursuing several alternative sensor cap designs to make them more ergonomically comfortable for extended wear and to provide a less obtrusive appearance, without sacrificing repeatability and precision of sensor placement and signal reception. The firm provided electronics hardware and software device drivers to link the BCI software with the hardware from several different manufacturers.

Cambridge Consultants also helped create a graphical software interface with icons and sound so that patients can more readily communicate with their caregivers. For example, patients now can access icons for "water" and "food," and traverse a menu with a variety of choices using their brain waves to transcend the language barrier.

Patients make these selections in either of two ways. In one, they pay attention to a particular icon displayed among many in a grid on the computer screen. As the various icons flash in succession, a distinct electrical response is evoked in the brain by the attended icon. The system tracks the timing of the flashes and the evoked response, identifies the attended icon and outputs the appropriate sound, text, and/or environmental control signal.

In the second method, the user can imagine particular movements. Even if the user is totally paralyzed, this imagined action generates a localized electrical stimulus in the brain that can be detected by the BCI system. The system then maps that action to moving the computer cursor in a particular direction. In this manner, the user can navigate menu structures to select actions and/or perform word processing activities, similar to the way in which people normally use a computer mouse. The system can also generate speech from those words created on computer, enabling users to communicate audibly with a caregiver if they choose.

Future iterations will provide the ability to interface with environmental control systems to turn lights on and off or change the channel on a television as well as to communicate remotely with caregivers. Additionally, Cambridge Consultants is developing software that will allow the BCI group to retrieve system-use data from users around the world.

With Cambridge Consultants’ enhancements, the BCI system can be used by people speaking any language, since the system is now icon-driven versus text-driven. The software is provided free by the BCI group for non-commercial research uses and is powered by a standard laptop computer. The sensor cap is being designed for ease of manufacture and low cost, and the hardware and software provided by Cambridge Consultants are allowing the BCI Group to test amplifiers less expensive than those currently used with the system. All of these changes are aimed at providing a system cost of less than $5000.

"Our mission is to turn a promising laboratory technology into a device suitable for extended, daily use that is comfortable for the user, simplifying a sophisticated research device so that anybody with basic computer understanding could operate it," said Andrew Diston, Vice President Cambridge Consultants.

Diston continued, "Breakthrough technologies are created every day in labs, yet the real art to the science of innovation is to make innovations usable and affordable on a larger scale. We’re delighted to be working in partnership with Dr. Wolpaw and his team to let technology give a voice to patients who are most in need of one. His design work is well deserving of its numerous awards, and we believe will vastly advance the applicability of BCIs across many other application categories."

To download a high resolution image click below:

Picture caption: Traces recorded from the scalps of four individuals using the BCI system to move a cursor from the centre of a computer screen to targets around the edge. The cursor paths are shown, with colour representing speed at each point, from slowest (blue) to fastest (red). (Credits: Dean Krusienski and Gerwin Schalk, Wadsworth Center, New York State Dept. of Health, Albany, New York.)

Notes to Editors

About Brain-Computer Interfaces
Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) can provide communication and control to people who are totally paralyzed. BCIs can use noninvasive or invasive methods for reading brain signals that convey a user's commands. Non-invasive BCIs using scalp-recorded electroencephalographic activity and adaptive algorithms can provide people, including people with spinal cord injuries, multidimensional point-to-point control of a computer cursor that falls within the range of that reported with invasive methods. BCIs could eventually become an important communication and control option for people with severe motor disabilities who could use brain signals to operate a robotic arm or a neuroprosthesis without needing to have electrodes implanted in their brains.