Hear the letters BMI and the first thing you probably think of is “body mass index.” Keep your eyes peeled because “brain-machine interfaces” could soon hijack more than just the acronym.
Jose Carmena was in a mid-Ph.D. crisis studying robotics at the University of Edinburgh when Miguel Nicolelis, John Chapin, and colleagues from Duke University and the MCP Hahnemann University School of Medicine published a paper showing that lab rats could control a simple robotic device using brain activity alone—and an implant. It was 1999, and marked the beginning of BMI as a field. Carmena never looked back. Born into a family of physicians, he’d finally found a field that married his intellectual interest in robotics and the brain to his personal ones. BMIs had a very clear clinical application: creating better neuroprosthetic devices for people with movement disabilities.
Carmena is now professor of electrical engineering and neuroscience at Berkeley and co-director of the Center for Neural Engineering and Prostheses at Berkeley and UCSF. His BMI research explores fundamental questions such as “How do you connect the brain to a machine?” “How can we turn thought into action?” “Or sensation into perception?” One day, BMIs could enable patients with prosthetic hands to braid hair or play Chopin by offering them a combined sense of touch and precise mobility that equals or even surpasses natural biological capabilities.