How Brain-Computer Interfaces Are Changing Lives for Kids

So to start off, you've described the brain-computer interfaces, or BCIs, as a new way for people to interact with the world.

For listeners who may be unfamiliar with this field, what does the interaction actually look like in practice for children living with complex neurological disabilities? And how close are we to seeing BCIs become part of everyday life rather than within the research environment?

Great.

Thanks, Seth.

So there's a couple of questions in there.

So I'll start with sort of what a BCI is or a brain-computer interface is, especially for those who might not be familiar with it.

And then I'll answer sort of what that looks like for kids and kids living with complex needs.

I do end up talking quite a bit about what BCIs are not because sometimes people hear about this and they get a little bit worried or anxious thinking, oh, you can read my mind or read my thoughts.

They bring up visions of science fiction concerns.

Things like Black Mirror is one that people have asked me about quite a bit before.

I try to emphasize That's not exactly what it is.

It's almost more akin, you could think about it as like a big sort of electric response, something that I can't understand what your thoughts are, but sort of these really simple pathways that we've had for a long time, really trying to tap into those.

So the way that a BCI works, a brain period interface really works.

And I am going to be talking about the non-implanted space.

is that we have little sensors that we put on the scalp, and those sensors will read this big electric activity changing from the brain.

This is quite a bit different than the implanted space, which a lot of people hear about from the news, and they see these sort of amazing outcomes from the implanted space, where they actually are putting those sensors sort of on the brain surface itself.

But that requires a surgery, and a lot of the kids I work with, that obviously will not be great.

And the difference between the two, you can kind of think about it with respect to a stadium.

There's a stadium analogy that we sometimes use.

For the implanted space, it'd be like if you took a microphone into a sports stadium and you put that microphone in front of the section of fans right there, you could hear all of them yelling very, very clearly.

In the non-implanted space, where we have this sensor sort of on the scalp, it's like you took that microphone and put it two miles down the road.

So you can't really tell who's yelling or what's going on there, but you know when a big event happens.

So when one team scores, you're like, okay, something occurred there.

So that's the basic idea.

You get these big electric changes in the brain.