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SALT LAKE CITY — Siri not quite up to par? The future of smart devices could be implanted in your brain and read your mind.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is working on building a device that can anticipate what your body needs by reading brain signals, said DARPA program manager Justin Sanchez at a DARPA conference in June.
"Many of you are just getting things back like 'this is what your heart rate is right now' or 'you took 6,000 steps today,'" Sanchez said at the conference during a talk titled Brain-Machine Symbiosis. "Who cares about that stuff? What you really want to do is use that information to help you interact with machines in a much deeper way ... today we don't typically aggregate those signals together and do something with it."
The potential technology could do something like read body temperature signals and adjust your house’s thermostat settings so you don’t get too hot or cold, he said.
"You could interact with your environment, your architecture," Sanchez said. "Let's say you're having a low point in your day in terms of productivity so what if you had an interface that could say 'how about doing this? Maybe this could spark your productivity?'"
Brain implants have been around for years, but this is the first time DARPA has expressed interest in personal devices. Technology Review reported that more than 110,000 Parkinson’s patients have had deep-brain stimulators inserted to help control body tremors. NeuroPace is another brain implant that monitors potential seizure activity in people with epilepsy and tries to prevent them with pulses.
You could interact with your environment, your architecture. Let's say you're having a low point in your day in terms of productivity so what if you had an interface that could say 'how about doing this? Maybe this could spark your productivity?'
–Justin Sanchez
DARPA is already working on brain computers to improve health. It was awarded $70 million from President Barack Obama’s BRAIN Initiative in 2014 to test brain implants to read and possibly control the emotions of people with mental illnesses.
“Imagine if I have an addiction to alcohol and I have a craving,” researcher Jose Carmena, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, told Technology Review in 2014. “We could detect that feeling and then stimulate inside the brain to stop it from happening.”
Watch the entire Brain-Machine Symbiosis talk here.
Would you want a personal assistant in your brain? Let us know in the comments.
