Future Toys - Mind Controlled Interfaces

BRAIN CONTROLLED INTERFACES:

As people get their first taste of voice-controlled home robots and motion-based virtual realities, a quiet swath of technologists are thinking big picture about what comes after that. The answer has major implications for the way we’ll interact with our devices in the near future.

A new method of interacting with your everyday devices is to control them with your brain. this idea has picked up pace after some recent events in tech industry and the pioneer of producing such systems which allow us to control devices using brain is NEURABLE. 

This boston based startup  which was recently granted $2 million by Ann Arbor-to-Cambridge transplant in a seed round led by Brian Shin of BOSS Syndicate, a Boston-based alliance of regionally focused angel investors. Other investors include PJC, Loup Ventures and NXT Ventures. Previously, the company took home more than $400,000 after bagging the second-place prize at the Rice Business Plan Competition.

Unlike other neuro-startups like Interaxon’s Muse and Thync , Neurable has no intention to build its own hardware, instead relying on readily available electroencephalography (EEG) devices, which usually resemble a cap or a headband. Equipped with multiple sensors that can detect and map electrical activity in the brain.

Brain Controlled Robot Interface Employs Artificial Intelligence to Bridge Communication Gap

EEG headsets record neural activity which can then be interpreted by custom software and translated into an output. Such a system is known as a brain computer interface, or BCI. The BCI's are best known for their applications for people with severe disabilities, like ALS and other neuromuscular conditions. The problem is that most of these systems are really slow; it can take 20 seconds for a wearer to execute a simple action, like choosing one of two symbols on a screen.

Neurable’s core innovation is a machine learning method that could cut down the processing wait so that user selection happens in real time. The same new analysis approach will also tackle the BCI signal to noise issue, amplifying the quality of the data to yield a more robust data set.

Instead of measuring specific brainwaves, Neurable’s software is powered by what Alcaide calls a “brain shape.” Measuring this shape — a pattern of responsive brain activity known as an event-related potential — is a way to gauge if a stimulus or other kind of event is important to the user. This brain imaging notion, roughly an observation of cause and effect, has actually been around in some form for at least 40 years.

“Our vision is to make this the standard human interaction platform for any hardware or software device,” Ramses Alcaide - one of the founders of neurable - said in an interview. “So people can walk into their homes or their offices and take control of their devices using a combination of their augmented reality systems and their brain activity.”. Alcaide said. “In the long game, we want to become that piece of software that runs on every hardware and software application that allows you to interpret brain activity."

A New Dawn of Cancer Research

CANCER IMMUNO-THERAPY:

Technologies and approaches from the physical sciences and engineering can act as enabling partners with biology to find solutions to difficult problems in medicine. Because the immune system plays a critical role in disease, engineering approaches grounded in immunology may hold the key to the discovery and development of novel treatments for cancer, infectious disease, and autoimmunity.

Cancer Immunotherapy is also known as “targeted therapy” in which drugs specifically target molecules on cancer cells that are responsible for their growth and spread. They do not have the broad spectrum of action that chemotherapy does, and whereas chemotherapy kills cancer cells (in addition to normal cells) targeted therapies will block the tumor cells from proliferating.

Targeted therapies are focused on the aberration present in the cancer, whether that is abnormal proteins on the cell surface or chromosomal abnormalities within the cell nucleus. Targeted therapies can be monoclonal antibodies, which are large molecules that interact with targets outside the cell, or they can be small-molecule compounds that are capable of entering the cell.

A study recently published in the journal Structure reveals how researchers are engineering immune cells to have enhanced capabilities of recognizing foreign proteins (antigens) on the surface of cancer cells.

“Our study demonstrates new routes for custom designing functional T cell receptors with optimal antigen recognition properties. This will help open the door for customized specificity in order to optimize T cell targeting and killing,” said the head of the research team, Brian Baker, PhD, Professor and Associate Dean at the University of Notre Dame. “Immunotherapy is changing how cancer is treated.”

T cells are the guardian cells of the immune system that surveille and destroy cancer cells. Receptors on T cell surfaces will recognize foreign proteins on invaders (be it on bacteria, viruses or cancer). Researchers at Notre Dame wanted a better understanding of the specificity of T cell receptor (TCR) for the purposes of manipulating it. They successfully engineered a switch on the TCRs that is responsible for recognition of foreign proteins, specifically proteins on the surface of cancerous cells – which enabled a directed and “laser-like accuracy” immune response to cancer.