DARPA Is Developing an Implant that Can Read Brain Signals in Real-Time
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The latest project from the futurists at DARPA takes a detour from the agency's typical dabblings in autonomous robots and artificially intelligent computers to focus on the health of actual humans. The agency announced
its latest moonshot initiative today, a $70 million project to develop a
new implantable electronic device that can be used to treat some of the
mental disorders plaguing the US military.
The
ambitious goal is to create a medical device within five years that can
be implanted in the skull to monitor, analyze, and respond to real-time
information on the brain, somewhat like a pacemaker for grey matter. That
new level of insight into the human mind could lead to more effective
treatments for neurological and psychiatric disorders, researchers hope.
The
Defense Department has good reason to devote such a large chunk of
change to advancing neuroscience. Today, the leading cause of soldiers'
hospital stays isn't physical injuries, but mental conditions like
post-traumatic stress, traumatic brain injury, depression, anxiety, and
substance abuse, DARPA said in its announcement.
The agency is turning to technology to better understand these problems. The project is part of the White House's BRAIN initiative
to research the mind to uncover new treatments for mental health.
President Obama’s budgeted $100 million for the first year, half of
which will go to DARPA.
DARPA is hoping to either improve on current "deep brain stimulation" technology, or develop new ways to do it better. Doctors
already use deep brain stimulation to treat certain neurological
disorders like Parkinson's disease—some 100,000 Parkinson's patients in
the world have chips in their brain today, the agency said. It works by
sending electrical impulses to the affected areas of the brain to
regulate abnormal impulses caused by the disorder. Researchers are also
testing electronic chips to treat a number of other mental conditions,
like depression, OCD, Tourette's, and epilepsy.
But
the current technology is limited. The chips can't monitor how
effective the stimulation treatment is; they can't "read" brain signals.
That’s a hurdle for treating complex conditions like depression
that’s don’t have obvious biological indicators. And while
neurotechnology is advancing quickly, the human mind is still shrouded
in mystery. Researchers today rely on a fuzzy understanding of the brain
and trial-and-error approach to treat disease. “We're talking about a
whole systems approach to the brain, not a disease-by-disease
examination of a single process or a subset of processes,” DARPA program
manager Justin Sanchez said in the announcement.
Pulling
it off will require generating complex models of the brain systems.
Luckily, scientists from the government and private companies have been on a tear
in recent years trying to better understand the inner-workings of the
mind. The White House's BRAIN initiative is just one of the big-budget,
large-scale attempts to map the brain currently underway, and the
military has invested heavily in a wide range of neurotechnology.
Researchers
are also collecting unprecedented real-time information on the brain
from EEG technology that essentially read the mind and
transmit that data back to a computer for analysis. These "brain hacking" headpieces are becoming more advanced, increasingly commercialized and affordable, and are starting to be used to help treat mental conditions, namely ADHD.
DARPA's
collaborating with the National Institutes of Health and the National
Science Foundation on the project, called Systems-Based Neurotechnology
and Understanding for the Treatment of Neuropsychological Illnesses.
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