Brain-Machine Interfaces

Contact: Dante Muratore

Brain-machine interfaces (BMIs) provide a direct communication path between the brain and an external device. BMIs of the future will be used to treat diverse neurological disorders (blindness, deafness, locked-in syndrome, etc.) and augment human capabilities. To do so, we need to build devices capable of interfacing with the nervous system at its natural resolution. This poses major engineering challenges on the circuits and systems needed for BMIs. Current systems were designed for basic neuroscience research to record and transmit wide-bandwidth signals with high resolution, thus requiring relatively high power consumption. As custom signal specifications for BMI applications become clearer and are diverging from those needed for basic neuroscience, there is an opportunity for co-developing more efficient ad-hoc systems for BMI applications. System integration, near-sensor and/or in-sensor data processing, sub-Nyquist sampling, and event-based data communication are some of the research ideas that will allow us to develop implantable neural interfaces capable of speaking the same language as the brain.

Projects under this theme

Single Cell and Cell-Type Resolution Bi-Directional Neural Interface for an Artificial Retina

This project focuses on the design of a massively parallel bi-directional neural interface capable of interacting with neurons at their native resolution.