Mind dialingDialing with your brain

Researchers have developed a device that allows individuals to make a cell phone call using only their mind. The gadget non-invasively analyzes an individual’s electrical activity in the brain and translates those pulses wirelessly to dial a cell phone.

Tzyy-Ping Jung, the associate director of the Swartz Center for Computational Neuroscience at the University of California, San Diego, and his team of researchers originally designed the system to help severely disabled people, but believe that it has a broad range of applications.

Jung’s team imagines that their technology can be used to help build an advanced hands-free set for cell phone users or to detect when drivers or air-traffic controllers are becoming sleepy by sensing lapses in concentration.

To place a call using the device, a user must place electrodes on their scalp that are connected to an electroencephalogram (EEG) headband. The headband then transmits the signals via Bluetooth to a cell phone which uses algorithms to process the data from the brain to dial numbers.

In trials, the system was able to achieve 100 percent accuracy in the majority of test subjects after a brief period of training.

The training consists of studying a visual feedback system that flashes numbers on a computer screen at different speeds. The EEG headband is able to detect what number a person is looking at based on the frequency at which it is flashing. For instance, the number one would flash at nine hertz while the number two would flash at 9.25 hertz.

Jung explains that these minute differences in speed are detected by a part of the brain known as the midline occipital.

The results of his test were recently published in the Journal of Neural Engineering. In the trial ten subjects dialed a ten digit number with seven participants achieving 100 percent accuracy.

“From our experience, anyone can do it. Some people have a higher accuracy than others,” said Jung.

The system is still in its experimental phase, and some analysts are skeptical that the technology can be successfully applied to cell phones.

Eric Leuthadrt, the director of the Center for Innovation and Neuroscience Technology at Washington University said, “Reducing the size of the processors to a cell phone is a natural step.”

But, Leuthadrt said, the brain requires a large visual stimulant to evoke a neurological response and that cell phone displays cannot provide enough visual stimulus elicit this type of response.