Can electrodes recording muscle activity be a better input device than a keyboard and a trackpad? Only if humans have the ability to control individual motor units separately. All of the evidence indicates the opposite: that our nervous system is hard wired to recruit motor units together in an orderly fashion.<p>You can make an argument that a wristband input device is more portable or has entertainment value. But the idea that this is going to give you more degrees of freedom needs some serious evidence.
There are stroke victims who are trapped inside a body that is no longer operational. Sometimes, all they can manage to do is move one or two appendages. If this computer can free these kinds of shut-ins, it will be life changing.
Hello, if anybody on this project is reading this then you really really need my help. I am quadriplegic and this looks like it would make my life about 14.3 million percent easier (roughly).<p>My email address is in my profile and I beta test new devices from an accessibility perspective professionally and just as part of making my life easier!<p>Very cool advances, would love to be involved.<p>Thanks, Stuart.
I smell a hype cycle revving up.<p>There are no actual images of the device, nor any videos of it being used. Just a bunch of supposed in use stills and descriptions of how it works.
The world's most advanced BCI - the hand!<p>But seriously, I don't understand the problem they're trying to solve here. Nobody is going to learn to stimulate their muscles in new ways for an interface - an interface is supposed to make things easier. And if they're not using new stimulation patterns, or firing individual motor units, they're just moving their (arms|eyes|faces|...), which can be detected easily enough with a camera.<p>Not to say that the technology isn't interesting, but I think until we understand the brain much better than we do currently, the only use for BCIs is precisely the market they dismiss in the introduction - the severely disabled.