During the first week in June, the 4th international BCI Meeting was held outside beautiful Monterey, California. This being my first BCI conference, I was excited to find out what innovations in the field were either in development or already being implemented. The organizers mentioned that the number of meeting participants had grown exponentially since its last gathering five years ago, a trend that mimics the number of BCI publications produced each year. A PubMed search for "brain-computer interface" gave 209 results for 1990-2009, whereas from 2006-2010 the same search yielded 507 results in just four years.
Okay, great, so BCI pubs are growing as fast as my full belly after a visit to Blue Ribbon Bar-B-Q, but has BCI research progressed in making the lives of those in need of such interfaces any easier? I would say "yes" and "no". To my knowledge, The Wadsworth Center is currently the only institution offering in-home use of a BCI, and this is limited to people participating in their research studies. So, from a clinical perspective, there is a ways to go before people with locked-in syndrome or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) can benefit from the research being done in the lab setting. One of the workshops at the BCI Meeting brought up this very topic -- how do we overcome the hurdles of bringing EEG-based (the "easiest" of the methods available at the moment) BCI to users outside the controlled environment of a university lab? This is not an easy question to wrap up quickly. In fact, a large portion of the BCI community at the conference was working on at least some method for better removing artifacts in EEG data or optimally choosing electrodes that are user-specific rather than generalized to a larger population set. These sorts of adaptive algorithms are getting faster as well as integrating research from engineering, computer science, and neuroscience in new and interesting ways.
As for trends in BCI stimulus presentation paradigms, a once-over of the posters displayed at the BCI Meeting show that good ole P300 Speller is still the most widely used form of BCI. The P300 Speller has proven to be successfully used by various patient groups with relatively high accuracy for typing emails and other similar tasks, yet it has the drawback of being quite slow compared to non-BCI technology such as eye gaze tracking. Needless to say, the doors are wide open for someone to develop better methods other than P300 Spelling, sensorimotor rhythms (SMR), or steady-state visually-evoked potentials (SSVEP).
This leads me to discuss some BCI forecasts from the BCI Meeting. What doth the future bring? Cyborgs? A blurring of the line between man and machine? Robot wars?? Probably not. Addressing the comment above concerning better BCI methods, one promising avenue of research is that of hybrid BCIs (a topic which I will address in more detail at a later time) whereby different forms of brain and non-brain activated hardware could be used together. Gert Pfurtscheller and his team at TU Graz in Austria have written extensively on this topic recently.
Let's look further into the crystal ball of BCI shall we? The most exciting new branch of BCI research comes to us from the electrocorticography (ECoG) realm. Several labs brought posters addressing the use of ECoG as a possible EEG alternative for BCI. ECoG is primarily used for patients suffering from epileptic seizures. Before surgery, some epileptic patients agree to short-term experiments while a temporary grid of electrodes are placed over the gray matter. ECoG gives much higher resolution and signal-to-noise ratio than EEG and also renders far more reliable high gamma power, a frequency band thought to be important for motor-based decision making. ECoG BCI is in its infancy, yet I would be on the lookout for more to come from researchers investigating this invasive form of BCI.