NeuroVigil, a neurodiagnostics company headquartered in San Diego, has developed a way to hack your brain during sleep by using a headband fitted with electrodes to the wearer’s head to record brainwaves. The company hopes this technology could be used to help people with neurological disorders, such as prominent physicist and author Stephen Hawking, communicate.
The iBrain, NeuroVigil’s name for the mobile brain scanner, is a portable brain scanner that includes a miniature electronics box attached to an elastic head harness and electrodes. Electrical brain signals change with different activities and thoughts or with pathologies that accompany brain disorders. The iBrain can record hours of information to monitor conditions such as depression, sleep apnea, autism, and schizophrenia, as well as monitor patients’ brains after drug intake. CONNECT Foundation gave the device the Most Innovative New Product in Life Sciences award in 2010.
NeuroVigil’s invention uses the SPEARS algorithm, developed by NeuroVigil founder Dr. Philip Low, to create a map of brain activity and analyze data to detect and diagnose sleep-related medical conditions and central nervous system diseases. Together, the iBrain and the SPEARS algorithm allow for detailed and efficient sleep studies at a much lower cost than a traditional study requiring patients to be observed in a clinic, with the same accuracy. Not content with this accomplishment, last summer Low and his team flew to Cambridge, England to visit physicist Stephen Hawking, who suffers from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. ALS and other neurological disorders lead to loss of control over voluntary muscles, creeping paralysis, difficulty swallowing and breathing, and eventually, death.
Hawking has lived with ALS for nearly 50 years, an uncommonly long time, as most people diagnosed with the disease have a life expectancy of 10 years or less. He currently communicates by using a pair of glasses that have an infrared sensor to pick up small muscle twitches in his cheek. Using this method, it takes Hawking several minutes to construct even simple sentences. Dr. Low hopes that the iBrain can eventually help Hawking communicate by translating his brain waves into letters, words, or commands for a computer.
During preliminary research, Hawking was fitted with the iBrain and asked to imagine that he was scrunching his hand into a fist. As Hawking’s thoughts generated electrical waves in his brain, the device was able to pick up these waves and represent them as a series of spikes on a grid. Dr. Low and his fellow researchers were pleased that Hawking’s command translated into a change in the signal picked up by the iBrain. Before the iBrain is a viable communication system for Hawking, specific algorithms need to be created by a team analyzing his thought patterns. Hawking, or others diagnosed with ALS, will have to create consistent and repeatable thought patterns that the iBrain can then detect and the SPEARS algorithm can interpret into letters, words, or commands.
Although the device is not yet a solution of communication for people with ALS and other neurological disorders, many researchers in the field are hopeful about the technology’s promise. This coming July, Low and Hawking will again team up to present their data at the First Annual Francis Crick Memorial Conference.
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