NextMind is building a real-time brain computer interface | Hacker News Reader

NextMind is building a real-time brain computer interface

venturebeat.com

81 pointsvo2maxer32 comments

I'm intrigued by the electrodes they claim to be having 4 times better SNR than conventional electrodes. AFAIK there has been numerous attempts at dry electrodes (electrodes w/o gel for impedance control), but due to higher impedance, SNR has always been worse than wet electrodes as a result. The main advantage of dry electrodes has been faster prep time & convenience at a cost of signal fidelity. I'd be interested in technical details, but information on their website doesn't really let on much. Wonder how they actually compare to market leaders in research grade electrodes (e.g. BrainProducts, Neuroscan).

The founder's previous research seems to be focused on topics related to consciousness and sleep. I was hoping if he published articles about electrode materials, but can't find any. Maybe it's a trade secret.. Anyone with more info on this?

Also, their electrodes seem to be mostly focused on the occipital area. I get the impression they'd be focused more on visual components rather than cognition and decision making (e.g. P300).

I don't know the technical details but I can tell you the CEO would not disclose the material with me. He did confirm that it's proprietary and that the team worked with chemists to make it.

Full disclosure: I'm the article author.

Super cool and well played making it difficult on the duck hunt...

Question: In the duck hunt video, I don’t see a noticeable “flicker” that’s normally associated with visual bci inputs... were the flapping of the wings the stimulus <> cortex hertz sync?? (Or did they even say??)

If so, dang clever. If there’s no hertz sync, that’s flippin incredible.

Can’t wait for the completely autonomous inputs, without the visual flickery required.

Although I'm doubtful about most of the claims this product makes, there's quite a bit of research into visual stimuli without that flicker. This 2018 paper for example: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-24008-8 "Highly Interactive Brain–Computer Interface Based on Flicker-Free Steady-State Motion Visual Evoked Potential" (Han et al.) Although that uses a real EEG headset, the article doesn't really convince me that this one will perform that much better than the existing products in the consumer space. Did anybody find publications that evaluate this one in particular?

Solid — thank you. To me the visual modulation (shape and contrast) is a clever ux work around. Definitely great for a glasses first environment

It doesn't even matter what the SNR is. EEG is an extremely low bandwidth signal that measures average activity of BILLIONS of neurons. It's not possible to do anything significant with it. These guys are just capitalizing on hype and they will be able to build some toy demos, but never anything really useful.

Neurons work in a coordinated manner. Experiments with monkeys shows you can get by with a lot of undersampling. But orders of magnitude still seems to matter.

As an anesthesiologist working with EEG to monitor anesthesia, thank you for this comment.

I wouldn't say you can't do anything significant, it's a bit like listening on a computer with a stethoscope. You can certainly deduce something from fans and psu noise etc, but it's VERY crude.

I wouldn't discard the bandwidth of EEG so quickly. Clinical EEG has low bandwidth (<100 Hz), but in principle you can get up to the kHz range, enough to pick up individual neuron activity. Of course you will pick up mix of many neurons at any given electrode, but if you could ramp up the electrode density, it would make some degree of unmixing possible.

What are the best publications, journals, twitter feeds, etc to follow if I want to understand the state of the art in BCI? How closely does shipping hardware track the state of the art? Is the research mostly industry driven at this point or is it still blue-sky?

There are 3 serious companies - Kernel, Neuralink, Paradromics (Ctrl-labs does not make brain interfaces, per se).

If you want to look at what's coming next - check out what DARPA is funding through their NESD and N^3 programs.

The hardware currently being shipped is awful, including the original link.

I expect industry-relevant technologies to be showcased in under two years, with commercial products following shortly.

There is a HUGE gap in time-to-market between invasive and non-invasive technologies for regulatory reasons.

Imagine using this with CTRL kit wrist band

Because NextMind interaction seemed very slow, so would be difficult to move around with for example: the mouse, or writing text. This might be quicker in the future where you could imagine whole words and write it. But I think they need some timer safety so not random words or random actions happens.

This is something that I imagine CTRL labs wrist band could handle a lot better since it deals with the hand motions and seemed to be quicker in response.

So Nextmind is used for saying what I want to interact with while CTRL kit wrist band is used to how your interact.

...that communicates at such a low bitrate, it isn't even practical for the most interesting use-cases. When you see big claims like this and all they have is an EEG, you realize these guys didn't do their homework. EEGs are physically limited in their resolution. You'll only capture very large scale oscillations, hence the low bitrate.

I disagree. Even if you could record only a couple of bits (essentially being able to click with your mind), wouldn't this be useful already?

If you still need to point to right area of the screen using trackpad or mouse, and can only perform the click event with your mind, I can't see how is that useful.

This is assuming you are operating a computer and not any other kind of machine. It would be very easy to assign multiple actions to different click patterns. For example, while driving:

- Click once to skip to next song - Click twice to go back to previous song - Click thrice to pause

While using any kind of industrial machine:

- Click once to emergency stop

While doing anything that involves both hands:

- Click once to perform an auxiliary action

Being able to click without having to physically perform anything can significantly reduce reaction time. If this system can be made reliable, there are a ton of dangerous or complex jobs that can be simplified and made safer with this technology.

>there are a ton of dangerous or complex jobs that can be simplified and made safer with this technology.

Honestly, this is a good point. However, just to play a devils advocate, for emergency situations you don't need a real-time brain computer. You can just measure the adrenaline level or heartbeat rate (which is trivially easy with present tech) and on once it jumps, you shut down the whole machinery.

My point being, complicated brain link is not needed to send what is, essentially, a "SOS" signal.

Maybe not by itself, but maybe useful in conjunction with eye tracking?

But eye tracking is a huge problem in itself, and, to my knowledge, it's not solved at all. I type this as I sit in front of my "15 notebook, and I need barely move my eyes to see the whole screen.

I think that figuring out where exactly I look on my screen is impossible problem to solve, since I always clearly see at least 3/4 of the whole screen. You can only guess where exactly on this 3/4 property of my screen I'm really focused.

I have tested several eye tracking solutions on VR platforms, including Tobii and FOVE. Both solutions worked well enough for me to play games at the same speed I would with other control methods. Although it may be that eye tracking from that close of a distance works better than from a laptop screen distance, I haven't tried the Tobii laptop eye tracking solution so I can't say.

One use case: When I had a bad case of RSI, I got foot pedals to use as mouse buttons because clicking the mouse was painful.

I don't think you're actually disagreeing with me; you're saying that something is possible with a low bitrate. Are the most interesting use cases possible? Probably not.

Seems aimilar to the Swiss startup Mindmaze - 2016 Intro article after their initial fundraise https://www.forbes.com/sites/aarontilley/2016/02/17/mindmaze...

And a more recent Wired article https://www.wired.co.uk/article/mind-maze-virtual-reality-br...

Any Brain Computer Interface needs to be locally hosted, non cloud dependent, and open source. A proprietary license can protect the code, but anything touching the brain should be open, transparent, and auditable.

From what I can tell, it will be locally hosted, and non-cloud dependent. Don't know about the open source though (we can guess not).

Regarding the second part of your comment, an EEG device like that will have access to way less information (even with state-of-the-art signal processing techniques) than, say, an Apple watch or a FitBit, which have access to tons of biometric information (pulse, ECG, sleep data, constant geolocalization, living habits + much more if you also upload your weight and blood pressure measurements in the companion app), yet the vast majority of the public didn't seem to be too preoccupied when those came out.

If you aren't calm enough to listen to your own mind voice and it take it out,

Putting an interface in there ain't gonna make any difference.

I'm surprised they didn't list testing the effectiveness of advertising as a use case.

They did discuss the case of an alarm becoming more insistent if a pilot didn't notice it. I think it's a small hop from that to "We will only charge you for the ads that people notice in our ad supported VR game" type stuff.

I assume you could also use this for ad targeting if you could get people to watch the right content with their brain reading VR helmets on. "This person focused a bit more on the Cadillac driving through the screen than is typical. Let's show them a Cadillac ad."

> use this for ad targeting if you could get people to watch the right content with their brain

This sounds really wrong.

>I assume you could also use this for ad targeting

You could also use this for ad blocking, replacing ads in your vision with cute images of animals :)

Wouldn't this make a literal tinfoil hat effective ad-blocker or at least an actual privacy enhancement?

What would I need to know to be able to play with one of these?

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