Key Findings
Main priority: Shift from using animal models to benchtop testing
Longevity testing by stressing the N1 chips with environmental conditions that challenge seal enclosure strength, electronics, and the electrode threads.
Needle manufacturing and iterations to avoid the threads from bunching up or knotting in the cortex tissue
Using FPGA boards with ASIC for parallel analog and digital processing
Fine-tuning control for power consumption and thermal control
Creating synthetic materials with effort to create robust brain organoids
Automating neurosurgey in-house with custom robotics because the neurosurgeon bottleneck is severe (1 neurosurgeon/10,000,000 people)
Product development across surgical tools, like CNC bone drills to cut through the skull and insert an implant
Future applications with a promising visual prostheses that electrically stimulates the visual cortex to trigger white phosphene circles in the user’s visual field and is coupled with their eye saccades to create an image (when scaled)
Plan for new keyboard/mouse interactions for their visions of a brain I/O (input/output) interface
Work with a Consumer Advisory Board (CAB) of people with quadriplegia for an end-user perspective to help guide research and product development for a user-friendly BCI experience
Discussion
Special thanks to @savsidorov for co-hosting a twitter space with me to discuss the demo and future implications on neural interface design decisions:
Design BCI interfaces with mental axioms that persist across people
While accounting for each person’s cognitive reality nuances
The existence of variety in design patterns for thoughts and mental models
For example:
Sav thinks in conversation trees when talking to others
One of my friends thinks of environmental smells when remembering certain memories
A focus on cognitive phenomenology
Would be beneficial to create a Buzzfeed-like quiz for mental models
See which one each person thinks with and if they’re aware of it
Bridge the gap between different people with mental model design patterns
What’s the difference between an artist and mathematician’s line of thinking when traced
Mind blueprints!
Capture the neurodiversity of people’s mental models and represent it as software to establish a foundation and label the cognitive gaps between people who think differently