Scientists at the Federal Polytechnic School of Lausanne (EPFL) have announced the creation of a new neurochip that can recognize handwritten letters using brain signals with a high accuracy of 91%. The development is reportedly far superior to Neuralink’s chip in many ways New Atlas.
The MiBMI chip, developed by Swiss scientists, is 23 times smaller than the current Neuralink chip and has an area of only 8 mm². Its advantage is that it does not require needles to be implanted into neural tissue, as Neuralink does, where the probes often become dislodged or pop out. The MiBMI probe reads information from the surface of the cerebral cortex, which does not affect the accuracy of its work.
Swiss scientists approach the recognition of imaginary handwritten symbols differently: they assign unique code combinations called neural markers to the letters of the alphabet. Studies have shown that when thinking about writing a particular letter, number or other symbol, a series of specific markers appear. These markers were called distinctive neural codes (Distinctive Neural Codes, DNC).
This approach allows you to process hundreds of bytes of neurosignals for each code (character) instead of the usual thousands of bytes of information, which reduces chip power consumption and speeds up data processing. It also reduces the time required to train new implant users.
At the moment, the chip recognizes 31 handwritten characters, but in the future its capabilities will be expanded to hundreds of characters. The chip will not be limited to text recognition; it can be taught to recognize other types of brain activity. In the conducted experiments, the MiBMI chip achieved an accuracy of 91% when recognizing the imaginary writing of handwritten texts.
Note that the chip has not yet been tested on live humans; he worked with data from previous experiments. Instead, the Neuralink chip, although it looks old compared to the novelty, has already received approval for clinical trials in humans. This is the most difficult stage in the development of such technologies — to prove their safety and start providing real help to people.
Recall that the company Neuralink implanted its device in a second patient, who can now use digital devices through thoughts. Elon Musk, the head of Neuralink, noted that their technology is at the testing stage and is aimed at helping people with spinal cord injuries. The first patient managed to play games, browse the Internet, write on social networks and move the cursor on the laptop.
