Interview with Nick Ramsey
Interview with Nick Ramsey
Press on/off with a thought
"Teaching paralyzed patients an inner sign language."
The first: putting years of technical innovation to the test, trying to enable five paralyzed patients to operate a computer with their thoughts, in the Utrecht Neural Prosthesis (UNP) project.
The second project is called iCONNECT, for which Ramsey received a personal ERC Advanced grant of 2.5 million Euro. In iCONNECT, Ramsey’s group explores brain patterns and develops decoding strategies, using 7-Tesla MRI and electrocorticography. The aim is a BCI-system that interprets activity patterns on the surface of the brain, in real-time.
Imagine not being able to lift a finger, to communicate at all, but your brain still being in fine shape. Brain Computer Interface (BCI) techniques can put your thinking power to good use. Nick Ramsey and his team developed a BCI-device, transforming thoughts into computer commands.
Ramsey runs a lab where the latest developments in imaging brain activity, machine learning techniques and microsystems technology merge. His team of engineers, fMRI-experts and cognitive neuroscientists will work on two major projects at least until 2018.
Practical uitklapper, klik om te openen
"First, we have to teach paralyzed patients an inner sign language, like deaf people use. Since we know the brain area involved in hand movements gets active by just thinking about moving hands, we will try to connect one particular brain activity pattern in the hands-area to one phoneme: A, then B... To connect all 26 letters from the alphabet this way would just be too grand – we are hoping we can distinguish ten different signs from the patients’ unique brain activity patterns. Via implanted electrodes we want to register and decode these patterns, so that the connected phonemes can be heard or seen on a computer.”
“The demands are high, for patients, for us and for our partners who’ll build the soft- and hardware we need. But we’ve come quite far already – ‘science fiction’ hasn’t been part of our vocabulary for a long time.”
“As far as we know, no one in the world is doing what we do in the UNP project. Of course BCI is big in the USA, but most American groups are focused on robotic neuroprosthetics, like getting a robotic arm to pick up something. Spectacular, but only possible in a high tech lab setting. We aim to make something you can use at home: a kind of on/off switch that paralyzed patients can use to click through a computer menu, control a TV or an alarm to draw the attention of their caretaker. Theory and technical devices for this are all set; we’re excited about the upcoming research years with patients. To be able to transform thoughts into language our next challenge, iCONNECT, is to be able to transform thoughts into language: sounds, letters, maybe even words."