The Grill: Dawn M. Taylor on brain-computer interfaces

Published: May 24, 2009

Dawn M. Taylor is a research scientist at the Cleveland Functional Electrical Stimulation Center, a consortium of partners Case Western Reserve University, the Cleveland VA Medical Center and MetroHealth Medical Center. She is a co-author of Brain-Computer Interfaces: An International Assessment of Research and Development Trends (Springer, 2008), which discusses how years of research are beginning to produce practical tools for the disabled.

Why is research on brain-computer interfaces taking off now? Back in the early 1970s, University of Washington professor Eberhard Fetz connected individual neurons from a monkey’s brain to a voltmeter. He used a simple analog circuit to convert the firing rate of the recorded neuron into a voltage. If the monkey changed the neuron’s firing rate and got the voltmeter dial to go to the right, for example, he’d get a reward.

Now that computer capacity has greatly expanded, we have the ability to digitize and process many individual neural signals simultaneously and apply more sophisticated mathematical decoding algorithms to those signals.

What are you doing at the FES Center? The goal at the center is to restore movement and function to people with paralysis from spinal cord injury, stroke or other neurological disorders. Movement is restored by applying low levels of electrical current to the peripheral nerves to activate paralyzed muscles. My particular role is to decode one’s intended arm and hand movements from the brain. Basically, we are reconnecting the brain to the muscles so people can control their paralyzed limb just by thinking about doing so. Intended movements can also be used to control other technologies, such as prosthetic limbs, assistive robots or a computer mouse.

Read more on ComputerWorld

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License.

Back to top