Doctor establishes brain-computer interface lab in northern Ontario
B2By Frank Dobrovnik
THE CANADIAN PRESS

STE. MARIE, Ont. - Jana S. stares at letters flashing on a screen; her only movement is inside her head, as letter by painstaking letter she begins to type.

Algoma University has joined a small group of learning centres worldwide, researching how to get a computer to read one's mind, in a sense.

"The literature likes to say a brain-computer interface does not read your mind. But on a technical level, the computer is recognizing brain patterns," said George Townsend, an AU associate professor in the department of computer science and mathematics.

Townsend, 46, recently established a brain-computer interface (BCI) lab at AU, where he has been on staff since 1985 while pursuing faculty membership and his PhD. Over the years, he has collaborated with a number of neuroscience laboratories around the world, including the University of Western Ontario's department of physiology and clinical neurological sciences, the University of Michigan's direct brain interface project and the Institute for Knowledge Discovery at the Technical University of Graz in Austria.

While spending his 2007 research term at the New York State Department of Health's Wadsworth Research Center, Townsend developed a device for which he is now pursuing a patent and perfecting the technology that could one day see someone with complete paralysis be able to communicate, send e-mail and use the Internet using only brain signals.

The technology could benefit those with neurodegenerative disease such as amytrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), better known as Lou Gehrig disease, or a car crash victim with spinal paralysis. Those whose motor functions have been affected but retain their cognitive suffer from what's known as "locked-in syndrome."

"ALS is progressional. It gets worse until the subject can't even do an involuntary thing like breathe -- they can't control the diaphragm anymore and have to be put on a breathing apparatus -- but the whole time they're bright and thinking," Townsend said.

He was interested "not so much from a medical perspective but because I've always been interested in connecting computers to things, simple devices like lights or motors. Then I wanted to move on to something more challenging.

It's sort of the ultimate challenge: how do we connect the brain to a computer?"

In fact, BCI research began in the 1970s, but it wasn't until the mid-1990s that the first working experimental implants in humans appeared. Early working implants in humans now exist, designed to restore damaged hearing, sight and movement.

Cost is still an obstacle. A typical electroencephalograph (EEG) amplifier, which measures electrical activity produced by the brain as recorded from electrodes placed on the scalp, can cost up to $10,000.

Townsend and an intern, Michael Lajoie, are also developing technology for super-small EEG microchips that they hope will also eventually drop the price to "a few hundred dollars at most," he said.

"It's not only portable and cheaper, it's more reliable. That's the main thing."

He acknowledges existing technology is clumsy. Volunteer subjects focus on a screen of 72 letters, numbers, punctuation marks and short commands. The computer "reads" the one you focus on by a change in your brainwaves. Or that's the idea, at least.

Even a relatively short phrase can take agonizing minutes to compose, if at all. There is vast room -- and, above all, need -- for improvement, Townsend said.

"It's a very, very slow process. Even as opposed to typing, where you can get five to 10 keystrokes a second, the typical (BCI) throughput is measured in minutes," he said.

"The technology is still in its infancy."

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