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Advances in wireless brain signal-reading reported

From "ATR and Honda Successfully Develop New Brain-Machine Interface Creating Technology for Manipulating Robots Using Human Brain Activity," press release dated 24 May 2006 in English:

"Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International ('ATR') and Honda Research Institute Japan Co., Ltd. ('HRI') have collaboratively developed a new 'Brain Machine Interface' ('BMI') for manipulating robots using brain activity signals.

"This new BMI technology has enabled the decoding of natural brain activity and the use of the extracted data for the near real-time operation of a robot without an invasive incision of the head and brain. This breakthrough facilitates greater possibilities for new types of interface between machines and the human brain.

"The idea of this BMI technology is based on a highly acclaimed article titled 'Decoding the perceptual and subjective contents of the human brain' by Dr. Yukiyasu Kamitani, a researcher at ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories, which recently appeared in a leading science journal, Nature Neuroscience... This research reveals that MRI-based neural decoding can allow a robot hand to mimic the subject's finger movements ('paper-rock-scissors') by tracking the hemodynamic responses in the brain. Although there is an approximate 7-second time lag between the subject's movement and the robot's mimicking movement, the researchers succeeded in gaining a decoding accuracy of 85%.

"This technology is potentially applicable to other types of non-invasive brain measurements such as the brain's electric and magnetic fields and brain waves. By utilizing such methods, it is expected that the same result could be achieved with less time lag and more compact BMI system devices...

"Conventional non-invasive BMI required the user to undergo intensive training in order to generate detectable brain activities. For example, as the brain activity associated with an intention, say 'Yes', is very hard to track, the user is instructed to perform a mental task that is irrelevant to the mental state but associated with easily detectable brain activity such as mental calculation. The user must learn to control such brain activity to express an intention. The new BMI technology is different in that natural brain activity associated with specific movements can be decoded without using alternative brain activity... This is an outstanding breakthrough in brain decoding technologies."
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Some additional details from "To Operate Robot Only with Brain, ATR and Honda Develop BMI Base Technology," by Tsunenori Tomioka and Masaru Yoshida, Nikkei Monozukuri (via Tech On! in English), 25 May:

Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging "...is highly reliable to know what part of the brain is working on a spatial basis, but it takes about 5 seconds for changes to show on the image after the brain starts working as the technology measures brain activity with brain blood stream ...changes in the wake of brain activity. Combined with about 2 seconds separately needed to transmit and analyze signals, it takes about 7 seconds before the robot starts mimicking the subject's action, which may be regarded as rather slow. In addition, fMRI is a large machine and costs as much as hundreds of million yen. Therefore, ATR and Honda are currently testing other methods than to use fMRI, such as to employ a less expensive near-infrared system and a system using measurement of brain waves or magnetic fields, where signals run faster..."

[Wireless: 26 May 2006]