Neuromorphic technology has several applications, ranging from pattern recognition to robotics. One of the most interesting application domain is neural prosthetics. This is a fascinating twist on the idea of “borrowing” from biology: designing chips inspired by the nervous systems, which are then implanted back in a living organism to restore lost functions. Read the rest of this entry »

Neural chips keep shrinking, but powering these chips still represents a challenge, especially for applications in the medical domain, such as neural prosthetics. A step towards the direction of reducing this issue has been recently taken by Brian Otis, professor of electrical engineering at the University of Washington. Otis, the lead researcher on NeuralWISP, has designed a microprocessor powered by a commercial radio-frequency reader that doubles as a data-collection device. The circuitry converts usable power from the reader to a voltage that can be used to power the “neural” chip. More information is available here.

1 in 1000 children is born deaf. Depending on the type of hearing loss, cochlear implants can help deaf babies acquire speech almost as well as normally hearing babies.

Not too long ago, when a person was deaf they had to rely on sign language to communicate. Thanks to small implantable devices, known as cochlear implants, this has changed over the course of the past decades. About 1 in a 1000 children are born deaf, and 4 in 1000 adults in the US are profoundly deaf. To date, about 150,000 of these people have been implanted. For most of them, these neural prostheses are a lifeline that restores basic auditory function. Cochlear implants are perhaps the most successful neural prosthesis to date.

Cochlear implants work on a technical principle whose basic origins date back to the late 18th century, to Wolfgang von Kempelen. In 1769, von Kempelen, ingeniously invented the world’s first speaking machine that synthesized speech with a two part system – a circuit consisting of an acoustic source and a bank of acoustic filters. His work has inspired a long line of research and was further developed by famous engineers, such as Sir Charles Wheatstone, Alexander Graham Bell and Homer Dudley. Read the rest of this entry »

Brain-computer interfacing is an area of research that is currently in flux as researchers try to understand not only what but who BCIs will work best for. One study by a group of researchers at Bremen University, Germany has recently attempted to determine who, exactly, is the key demographic for BCI use. More specifically, they looked at a group of subjects using a certain flavor of EEG-based BCI called steady state visually evoked potential (SSVEP), a technique where visual stimuli are flashed on a screen at certain frequencies. These flashes have very nice EEG signals for increasing classification accuracy during a certain visual task. Read the rest of this entry »