The nature of the technology that we are currently living with (and I’m thinking here of everything from implanted cardiac defibrillators to Kindles to cell phones) is vastly different from the technology that has preceded it, even if it has seemed to follow from a natural progression. Technology seems inevitably to push forward, endlesslessly, as if in fulfillment of unwritten but accepted common desires.
The possibilities of combining your body with mechanical elements, for instance, are proliferating. Artificial organs and mechanisms for supporting your existing organs are being developed all over the world. While internal prosthetics like pacemakers have become increasingly mainstream, as have implanted cardiac defibrillators, at the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation in the US, for instance, they have developed an artificial pancreas which turns out to be far more reliable than a real one.[1] Meanwhile a company called ARGO Medical Technologies recently developed a lower-body exoskeleton that you can strap onto the outside of your legs and will help you to walk even if you’ve been confined to a wheelchair for the last 20 years of your life.[2] Robotic hands that are triggered by the tendons in your forearm[3], the aforementioned spring-blade feet[4], etc, etc, and the list goes on. In the name of science, countless researchers are devoting their lives to working on ways of augmenting the potential of the human body.
Researchers are also hard at work devising new ways for people to seamlessly interface with their machines. At NTT DoCoMo, for instance, researchers have developed a prototype device that monitors your eye movement in order to flip from track to track on a portable music device[5]. The same company is also working on cellular phones with biochips that will be able to detect “excitement, emotion, stress, or disease” from your skin and transmit this information to the person you are speaking with.[6] One of the more exciting areas of interface design which has picked up a lot of steam recently is a type of feedback mechanism dubbed ‘haptics’, which allows a machine to give tactile responses to the person using it, rather than the standard visual feedback. Imagine for instance an onscreen button that you can feel when you press it, or a dry, flat screen that simulates the feel of fur or wetness[7]. But, beyond haptics, the most interesting [and invasive] advances in interfaces between people and machines tap directly into our neural activity using EEG [electroencephalogram] signals. Take for instance the ‘mental typewriter’ developed by the Fraunhoffer Institute in Berlin that allows people to move a cursor around on a screen by only using their brainwaves[8]. Or, as another example, think of the baseball cap recently developed by researchers in Taiwan that uses EEG signals to detect drowsiness in drivers and then sends a Bluetooth signal to an onboard computer, a technology that the researchers claim could someday be used to control “household electronics devices”[9]!
picture of EEG ballcap from here
Now isn’t that a surreal idea. The North House research project here at the University of Waterloo, in collaboration with a team at Simon Fraser is working on software for your peripheral device with which to control the systems of your house. I guess the next obvious step would be to make it literally telepathic.
And it shouldn’t be too hard either, I presume. Current BMI (brain machine interface) systems using EEG can recognize focused stimuli from 20 different regions of your brain. As the IPod has taught us, it is actually quite easy to perform a pretty complicated set of operations using only seven types of input, and presumably if necessary it would be possible to run a well designed interface with less. Imagine: you stimulate one part of your brain to turn on the program, another two parts of your brain to scroll through the different functions that you would like to adjust (like moisture control, temperature, amount of light entering the house through southern glazing), another part to select the function, and then the previous two again to adjust the settings. Stimulating a fifth part of the brain would allow you to escape back to the main menu.
Science fiction? Yes. Impossible. No.
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