Thinking of Child's Play
From: Scientific American - 09/2006 - Vol. 295, No. 3, P. 30
By: Tim Hornyak

A collaborative project by Advanced Telecommunications Research (ATR)
Institute International and Honda Research Institute Japan is a robot hand
that can translate the manipulations of a subject in a functional magnetic
resonance imaging (fMRI) machine into movements of its own mechanical digits
with 85 percent accuracy through a brain-machine interface. "We have been
working on methods for decoding brain activity," notes ATR cognitive
neuroscientist Yukiyasu Kamitani. "A brain-machine interface is only one of
many possible applications of the decoding technique." Changes in the
subject's blood flow linked with neural activity in the motor cortex are
examined by a machine-learning algorithm and the data is sent to the robot
hand, which replicates the finger movements. The advantage of the fMRI
approach, as opposed to faster brain-reading methods such as EEG, is that no
training is required. The interface cannot become a practical device until
Kamitani's group identifies mental activity of greater complexity. Technical
refinements include a significant reduction in the scanning equipment's
weight and size. The researchers' short-term goal is to make their decoding
method capable of reading pure intention instead of the actual movement,
making the robot hand capable of forming shapes through thought alone.  

Read the first part of the article at:
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa006&articleID=00034AED-7AEC-14E3-BAEC83414B7F0000

Links:
Yukiyasu Kamitani
http://www.cns.atr.jp/~kmtn/

Researchers Develop Brain-Robot Interface
http://cognews.com/1148844253/index_html

Mind-controlled robot hand now, cyborgs later
http://blog.scifi.com/tech/archives/2006/06/01/mindcontrolled.html

Robot hand controlled by thought alone
http://www.newscientisttech.com/article/dn9237-robot-hand-controlled-by-thought-alone.html