Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs): The future of human-computer interaction
Would brain chips make us cyborgs? How should HCI contribute to BCIs? A broad analysis, insights, and human-computer interaction concepts for the product of the future.
What is the brain-computer interface (BCI)?
Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) or brain-machine interfaces (BMIs) are invasive, partially-invasive, and non-invasive devices that record the brain’s electrical signals with EEG, EOG, and EMG methods. The signals are gathered by electrodes, analyzed on the interface of AI-powered software, converted to emotions or thoughts, and utilized for specific purposes. The determination of human beings to remedy people with diseases has made BCIs revolutionary. Today, BCIs can function as:
- Brain-to-interface
- Brain-to-prosthesis
- Brain-to-text & image
- Brain-to-brain
Development process
The history of BCIs goes way back than we expect. In 1924, Hans Berger discovered the brain’s electrical activity and achieved to acquire them with the EEG method. In 1970, National Science Foundation granted the University of California, and research began by computer scientist Jacques Vidal; then, DARPA contracted the studies. This research appeared the term brain-computer interface in the scientific literature for the first time. In 2021, the global BCI market was $1.52 billion and is expected to reach $5.3 billion by 2030.
Types of BCIs
- Invasive BCIs are tiny chips that are planted inside the scalp. It can gather the most precise signals because it’s located on the brain. It is mostly preferred for scientific research because of the cost, surgical process, and unknown long-term effects.
- Partially-invasive BCIs have two parts connected; the electrodes are planted under the scalp but not on the brain, lesser able to get brain signals for that reason, and the outer part is placed on the head and considered less risky than invasive BCIs.
- Non-invasive BCIs are devices worn on the head, like helmet or headphone, but cannot gather precise signals because the scalp absorbs them, but it is more marketable products for end-users to buy and use for personal use.
What do BCIs let humans do?
The purposes of BCIs’ development are mostly medical-oriented. Scientists endeavor to remedy people with visual impairments, motor disabilities, and paralysis. These remedies provide us these cutting-edge technologies to improve and ease our daily life, like how accessibility standards enhance the usability quality of a digital product.
1. Brain-to-interface: Use digital products
- The research report published in 2004 demonstrates the achievement of moving a 2D cursor with BCIs on a digital interface, and recent studies are still progressing to improve that function today.
- Neuralink works on partially-invasive BCI and achieved to control a mouse cursor and keyboard using “The Neuralink App”. Neuralink plans to develop an invasive BCI, allowing people to directly control computers and mobile devices with their thoughts in the future.
- Synchron developed an invasive BCI named “Stentrode”, mesh-shaped electrodes placed into the brain vessel, allowing users to use their digital products entirely by thought. It is waiting for approval from the FDA.
2. Brain-to-prosthesis: Control physical products
- The first robot control with non-invasive BCI was achieved in 1988. In 2005, BrainGate’s invasive BCI was achieved to control an artificial hand.
- The research report published in 2016 demonstrates and documents the achievement of controlling prostheses by thoughts via BCIs.
- UPMC (University of Pittsburgh Medical Center) achieved to let a person has quadriplegia move a prosthetic arm and relocate the objects by thought and let another patient with paralysis feel his fingers with the same prosthetic arm.
- Greg Gage, an adjunct professor from the University of Michigan, achieved to control arm of “another” person with thoughts.
- Meltin produces a consumer BCI “MELTz” that controls cybernetic prostheses for paralyzed people to let them relearn to use their hands.
3. Brain-to-text & image: Write and draw via thoughts
- The research report published by Standford University in 2021 demonstrates the achievement of letting the participants with paralysis write their thoughts with typing speeds of 90 characters per minute with 94.1% raw accuracy. The participants imagined moving their hands like writing the letters, and the software decoded them into digital.
- Synchron also achieved to provide their users to write their thoughts through their BCI, Stentrode.
- The University of Helsinki also achieved brain-to-image transmission in 2020. This concept is in the early development phase.
4. Brain-to-brain: Communicate telepathically
- The research run in 2014 achieved to let two people communicate with non-invasive BCIs. The subjects performed saying “hola” and “chaio” by imagining the letters of words they wanted to say, and the software encoded them in binary numbers and sent them to other people.
- The platform BrainNet that works with non-invasive BCIs that provides a way to communicate multiple people each other. According to the research report shared in 2019 demonstrates the achievement of letting three people communicate telepathically between their brains with their BCIs with an average accuracy of 81.25%.
How would BCIs impact human-computer interaction (HCI)?
Science and technology are correlated; as long as science advances and finds a way to produce the features easily, technology can cheaply bring those features as products to the end users for their daily life. The features above will certainly enter our lives in the future. The interrelations and combinations of recent technologies and BCIs are the futuristic extents of human-computer interaction which will be built for.
Combination with other devices and behavioral changes
Recent products have gone beyond desktop computers; they surround us. We wear them as watches and headphones, give control to our cars to autopilot, and make a robot clean our houses. Specific applications control all these products. We can assign tasks to them, and they run; we do that by tapping on the 2D screens. The screens will stay forever around us as sight is the most common sense of human-being, but our dependence on hardware like a keyboard or mouse will end up; using applications and achieving goals via screens will not remain forever.
Varjo has recently released their non-invasive BCI headset XR-3 combined with mixed reality (MR) glasses. These kinds of innovations will gradually increase in the future by combining wearables such as VR/AR/XR/MR devices. The size of these devices will reduce over time and extend the scope by spreading to the Internet of Things (IoT) and Bluetooth devices. Combining these devices with satellite internet services like Starlink will make the BCI and IoT combination accessible anywhere, anytime. These companies below develops their BCIs make this probability real:
- Bitbrain: BCI research, non-invasive end-user BCIs, and software.
- Blackrock: Scientific and academic BCI research and development.
- Emotiv: End-user non-invasive BCIs and software.
- Neurable: Headphone-like non-invasive BCIs for end-users.
- OpenBCI: Open-source BCI software and end-user BCIs.
Reverse interaction
The current devices we use have minimal interaction skills. The most capable one is the 2D screens we design primarily for. Sound and vibrations are the others and generally missing ones. The achievement of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center that lets a person feel their hand with an artificial hand connected to a BCI shows us we could transmit signals to the user to feel artificial senses such as sight, sound, smell, touch, and taste in the future.
Withal, the existing accessibility standards would be expected to be updated and extended for the five senses. HCI people must learn and execute neuroscience and biology fundamentals besides user experience methodology to provide better interaction design for users.
Decentralization of UX with AI integration
The data of the user is always important to create a personalized experience. As mentioned, BCIs can collect users’ thoughts, emotional states, and hormonal levels and provides us with an understanding of their instant state of them. All these data would occur infinite variable parameters to create the required experience for the user that a UX team or person cannot handle. If we cultivate AI enough to understand and reason users’ data efficiently, meaningfully, and reliably, it can create unique experiences for each user. That changes the existing situation:
- From: Static and pre-defined UX settings for all users by a UX team.
- To: Adaptive and variable UX settings for each user by AI.
Basically, that means decentralizing UX by assigning UX design to AI for future cognitive products that are controlled by thoughts. That structure could also provide adaptive accessibility settings for disabled users and variable environmental factors.
Unsurprisingly, AI has already become part of UX frameworks today; UX professionals have started to utilize AI for UX workflows; UX writing with ChatGPT is possible today. ChatGPT can understand contexts and create proper wordings to direct users. On the other hand, combining AI models such as ChatGPT to make Siri-like digital assistant, and communicating the digital assistant with reverse interaction, like hearing the assistant’s speech in your head, and controlling it with your thoughts will bring the human-computer interaction to the next level and that doesn’t seem far away.
For example, the growth rate of AI is increasing exponentially. OpenAI has released ChatGPT-4 has 100 trillion parameters, while ChatGPT-3 has 175 billion parameters, and the difference between these two release dates is just five months; that proves to achieve all concepts above very soon.
Blockchain and BCI association
When people have started to implant BCIs and do their daily needs with them, digital footprint tracking will be one of the most critical security requirements. Today, when you transfer your money, only your bank knows it; if you change your official ID name, only the government knows it, and you have to share and present that information with relevant corporations in any need. There is already a technology that can meet that deficit.
Blockchain is the distributed ledger of encrypted codes containing specific information accessible by anybody. When information is recorded inside a blockchain, it is impossible to change and remove. Each blockchain includes data -transaction-, hash -a unique ID- and previous hash to keep the blockchain related to the previous one. If blockchain is combined with BCIs, all the users’ data can be assigned to them to be responsible for, and companies and governments can utilize it.
As the closest example, thousands of people in Sweden have already implanted a subdermal implant, Bueno, developed by DSruptive Subdermals. Bueno allows users to store their ID information, state of health, electronic keys, business cards, public transport passes, and proof of vaccination.
If tech companies and governments will work collaboratively and ethically, BCIs’ serial numbers could be citizens’ ID numbers reliably and officially. That may provide users with accessible and responsible privacy and allow companies and governments to observe users’/citizens’ omnichannel footprint to provide better services and maintain public order. However, that concept causes considerations and concerns from different points of view.
Considerations about brain-computer interfaces
Having a chip in our brain that makes us superhuman may seem stimulating; however, the limit of BCIs affects several fields more than the human body. When people have BCI in their brains, may it cause differentiation in public? Is it safe for a state to have BCIs for all of its citizens? Do we know the long-term effects of BCIs? These questions have answers:
Medical effects: Do we know enough?
Fundamentally, BCIs are developed to remedy people, but similar to other medical treatments, they have rare medical side effects. In addition, invasive and partially invasive BCIs need to be implanted with surgery; according to the research, BCIs may cause the following:
- Infection on tissue
- Acute trauma
- Glial scarring
- Reduce sleep quality
- Brain may deny BCI
These are some known short-term but severe side effects; we still do not know enough about them. Neuroscientists have intensely developed BCIs for approximately 50 years, less than a human lifetime. The same research also suggests observing the future effects of BCIs to make them safe for general use. FDA has a Guidance for invasive BCIs. As technological developments also support medicine, we could expect not to see too severe side effects of BCIs in the future.
Social and ethical reflections: Will we transform into cyborgs?
When a remarkable rate of the human population has been implanted BCIs worldwide, they will have some extra capabilities that separate them from the non-BCI-implanted fraction of the world population, which may cause discrimination.
Yuval Noah Harari, professor in the Department of History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, known as a techno-pessimist, puts forward bioengineering and AI would cause the creation of a global useless class and super-human class by 2100.
On the other hand, making the world population cyborg, mind tracking, and mind reading theories that violate personal privacy are the ethical considerations about BCIs, but conspiracy theories have always been around. However, the Privacy Act of the FDA and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) of the European Commission covers and restrict these kinds of privacy deficits.
Official perspective: Who is the government now?
When the citizens of countries have implanted BCIs that record the citizens’ emotions, thoughts, and hormone levels, that will rightly be a safety issue for the governments. The fundamental duty of governments is to protect their citizens, public order, and the country’s safety. There are, fortunately, some regulations and guidance the governments can follow for BCI integration:
- The most comprehensive BCI regulation for governments is OECD Science, Technology and Industry Working Papers 2022/01. That regulation includes Ethical, Legal, and Social Implications (ELSI), consumer and data protection, and more.
- European Commission has proposal for Artificial Intelligence Regulation for the reliable use of AI.
- IEEE (The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) has released the AI Expertise and Safety Statement for governments and tech companies to develop AI properly and reliably.
- University of St. Thomas Journal of Law and Public Policy has released a paper named Neurolaw: Brain-Computer Interfaces that covers brain-hacking and other significant deficits of BCIs.
Suppose the governments act responsibly and avant-garde and collaborate with BCI companies, universities and global commissions. In that case, they can utilize that technology to build a better public order, country, and world for all without any issues. Nevertheless, there is still a need for a fully comprehensive regulation for the public and private use of BCIs that must be legislated by the FDA and European Commission that must be approved by all the countries worldwide.
How should HCI contribute BCIs?
Technology is advancing like evolution theory; the dedication of advancement needs to find a way to evolve and form the mainstream, then the side streams form as fractals. For example, the notion of HCI and UX did not exist when the first computer was invented. Today, besides UX design, we mention UX strategy, research, writing, accessibility, design systems, design-ops, etc. This structure must evolve and be associated with relevant fields of future technologies for human benefit.
Comprehend the associated disciplines
Human-computer interaction is regarding the interaction between humans and computers, as the name implies. Current digital products generally work on 2D digital screens that are seen by the eyes and used with fingers, but BCIs will change all the structures with the multiple touch point that we need to understand the fundamentals of:
- Neuroscience: The biological basics of the human body are the primary restrictions of the design. The human brain will be the new framework of the HCI field with BCIs. Comprehending the basics of the human body would provide to analyze the users by the book and to suggest HCI-wise proposals for the study appropriately.
- Cybernetics and wearable products: Secondary design restriction is computers. As long as we learn the devices’ varieties, capabilities, and limits, we can combine and utilize their unique skills to create functional design solutions for people’s needs.
- Blockchain: Tracking users’ digital footprint without missing any information securely will provide AI to generate decentralized experiences. Blockchain technology must be understood well to utilize efficiently, especially for companies and governments.
- Psychology: Current UX design structures depend on personas to create personalized experiences. We will be able to analyze users’ emotional states and hormone levels with BCIs, and we must comprehend the psychological fundamentals to provide methodologically-approved personal experiences.
- Sociology: Each society worldwide has a different mentality according to its unique culture. We can project several types of individual psyches by observing thoughts with BCIs. We must understand the sociological fundamentals well to provide culture-compatible and culture-ethical experiences for different societies.
- Regulations: Having access to the brain data of a person does not mean we can freely utilize them. When the authorities have released a worldwide-confirmed regulation, and the countries regulated BCIs in their constitutions, all the laws and regulations must be digested to avoid official issues and provide high-level privacy to the users.
- Artificial Intelligence: Human nature is always endeavoring to convenience its life, and AI is the milestone of that process. The possibility of creating a human-friendly, bias-free, and nature-saver AI is in our hands; instead of concerning we should participate and contribute to the development of AI.
Besides these fields, HCI fundamentals must be comprehended in detail; the academic book Human-Computer Interaction by Alan Dix is one of the essential books of the HCI field to achieve it. As long as we understand these fields, we can investigate and provide HCI services for useful, functional, and reliable BCIs for users. Being professional in all these fields simultaneously is impossible. New professions would be born in the future with the intersection of these fields with HCI.
Keep the future safe with HCI
Human-computer interaction is a field where humans and computers meet. Scientists and engineers endeavor to develop their products -computers- most functionally; biologists try to keep humans healthy; the governments’ duty is to keep the citizens and country safe, while AI is developing itself. HCI people are always the auditor of the products to keep them ethical, safe, and reliable. HCI people have more responsibility to audit each phase of the BCIs at this stage. We are the only community able to combine all these fields in harmony to create a better, safer, and more reliable future for all.
“If you think we can’t change the world, it just means you’re not one of those who will.”
- Jacque Fresco
