“Frontiers of Neuroengineering with focus on brain machine interface and neural prostheses”

Abstract

Neuroengineering is one of the fastest growing disciplines in the Biomedical Engineering community, especially in societies such as IEEE Engineering in Medicine in Biology and Medicine. I will begin my presentation with the overview of the field of Neuroengineering, spanning the cellular to brain, and from basic bench research to clinical applications. Progress in the field is covered by the journals such as the IEEE Transactions on Neural Systems and Rehabilitation Engineering that I am Editor in Chief of, covers this field. Within the field of Neuroengineering, and the journal, the ldquohot topicrdquo is brain machine interface, particularly the development of neural prostheses. I will present the basic ideas behind building the brain machine interface and expand to our recent work on the development of a dexterous arm and neural control of this dexterous arm prosthesis. The talk will present the technology, signal processing methods, the neuroscience foundations, and our work on controlling dexterous finger motions from neural signals. I will conclude the talk with some thoughts on the technological challenges faced in building the interfaces to brain and potential applications of tapping into the powers of the mind.