Concussion ... The Movie

I'm excited to see the trailer for the upcoming movie "Concussion" starring Will Smith about CTE in the NFL...

Neuroinformatics 2014

Last month I attended the 2014 Neuroinformatics conference in Leiden, Netherlands. This was a new meeting for me - I'm new to the community - and it was a real eye opener. It was very helpful to be in the presence of a community who've spent so much time and energy thinking about how to manage and analyze enormous sets of biomedical data. Happily, some kind soul video taped basically the whole thing. The videos are available here:


A great set of conference photos is up on Flikr too.

Note: Albert Einstein once lectured in that very same room - and the University of Leiden has been around since 1575 I believe. Pretty amazing.

Printing Prosthetic Limbs

Pure awesomeness. Technology is such a force for good in this world.

Temple Made: Mark Halberstadt

Temple Engineering attracts a lot of really cool, interesting students. They are tenacious, creative, hard working and driven to succeed. Mark is one such student. I've had him in a couple of courses during which time he voluntarily made youtube videos of my lectures, Khan Academy style. It was really nice to see him profiled by Temple News. Couldn't have picked a better guy.

Here are the videos Mark made from my lectures:

• EE Science 2 (ECE 23322) Fall 2012
• Signals and Systems (ECE 3512) Fall 2012

League of Denial

There's a new documentary from PBS about the blind eye that the NFL has allegedly turned towards the concussion situation in football. I haven't watched the show yet but its high on my list of priorities. Here's the link.

BMES 2013

So I just got back from the 2013 annual meeting of the Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES) in Seattle. I haven't been to this particular conference since 2008. It tends to focus more on the biophysical and molecular aspects of biomedical engineering, which isn't exactly my wheelhouse. Nevertheless, it was still pretty interesting and worth the haul out to the west coast. You can download and peruse the entire meeting program here.

A few items of particular interest. First, there was a pretty cool talk from the folks at Case Western Reserve who study peripheral neural interfaces. I've always liked their work because it's a nice balance of theoretical and practical - their interfaces are a great way of helping amputees without requiring holes drilled in the skull or endless training sessions with finicky EEG systems. The particular talk I attended showed how they used nerve stimulation to simulate the sensation of touch for a couple of patients using myoelectrically controlled prosthetic hands. As the hand grasps down, information from pressure and proprioceptive sensors embedded in the prosthesis is translated into electrical stimuli presented to one of the peripheral nerves. The patient has a sensation of touch, and the ability to grasp and have fine motor control with the prosthesis is enhanced. Very cool. Here is a video of their work:

Another cool talk I attended was about some Rice University undergraduates who created a wheelchair-mounted robotic gripper for an incoming freshman with "brittle bone" disease. It was a nice example of a well-executed senior design project in that it was designed to spec with a lot of well reasoned design decisions. Plus, it really made a difference for the patient. A video of their work is here:

Finally, there was a highly amusing talk by my old grad school mate Joe Tranquillo at Bucknell University in which he discussed making his biomedical Signals and Systems course more broad-based by inviting an improv music group to work with his students. Their semester project was to create musical instruments driven by biomedical signals and then hold an improv concert using these new instruments. Creative in a way that only Joe could think up. Nice work!

Deep Brain Stimulation

DBS is an amazing intervention for treating motor control disorders such as Parkinsons and Dystonia. These diseases are typically caused by dysfunction or death of various cell populations in the deep brain such as the substantia nigra or globus pallidus. DBS is amazing because it stops tremor instantaneously; turning the neurostimulator off usually causes the symptoms to return immediately.

This video shows a great example of this phenomenon. This gentleman appears to be a DBS patient from New Zealand. Watch as he turns his DBS on and off again. Pretty amazing.

Scott Mackler - BCI Pioneer

I've often felt that there should be more written about the patients who need and want brain interface technology. A few years ago I stumbled across this incredible story. There is a professor at the University of Pennsylvania who suffers from Lou Gehrig's disease and he runs his lab using a brain machine interface. It is an amazing story. An article about him from the Daily Pennsylvanian is here. His story was also told on 60 Minutes:

Stand-Up Wheelchair

I've been meaning to post this for a while - its a great promo video showing what a stand-up wheelchair can do and what kind of quality of life it can provide. While we're busy working on ways of interfacing to nerves and animating prostheses, its nice to remember that alternate technologies can often mean a lot more in the short term to patients.

Tisha UnArmed

I haven't blogged at all this semester! I've been busy writing a bunch of grants with my partner, Joe Picone. Hopefully a few of them will pan out and we'll have some interesting work to look forwards to. The topic of those grant proposals will be the subject of a future blog post.

In the meantime, I wanted to post this video which I've just come across. This individual has posted a series of videos about how she does her daily tasks even though she has no arms. I find it fascinating if only because its a reminder of how functional many "disabled" people are. Folks like myself who are interested in using technology to "better the lives" of such people would do well to reflect that Tisha can drive a car, dress herself, cook, bathe, and hold down a job. I've watched a handful of the videos and they are great.

The video reminded me of the blind volunteer I worked with during my postdoc in Brussels. My friend would come to the lab by train from another city, taking taxis to and from the train station, and he didn't use a cane or a seeing eye dog. He would just walk, talk, ride the train, and so on. You could easily talk to him for ten minutes and not notice he was blind.

I was also reminded of Ben Underwood, the blind teenager who used echolocation to navigate his world.

We are wonderfully adaptive creative people, we humans. Enjoy.

The Golden Ratio

The golden ratio is, like pi, a special number in nature. It equals 1.6180 and it can be found in many places both in mathematics and the natural world. For example, the lengths of various parts of our bodies are related by the golden ratio, and the ratio of successive numbers in the famous Fibonacci Series approach 1.6180 as well.

While I'm no authority on these matters, I did find this article pretty interesting. Turns out the length-to width ratio of the uterus varies from about 2 at birth to about 1.4 in old age. And during those years when women are most fertile, it hovers right around ... you guessed it, 1.6180. Pretty spiffy.

The fiendishly amusing Vi Hart has a series of three videos explaining about some of the places the Fibonacci series turns up in nature and explains why we might have expected it to be that way. They are totally worth watching!

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Pendulum Waves

I did this just for fun. Not a great use of my time but I learned a few neat tricks in the process. I wrote a Matlab simulation of a pendulum art project I saw online.

The original video I based my simulation on is here:

Not that you care, but the Matlab code can be downloaded by clicking here.

Video: The Future of Cyborgs

This is a neat little video where users of prosthetic limbs are interviewed. In my opinion, most of the people in the video don't actually meet the definition of cyborg. Not to worry - still plenty interesting:

Neat Coding Trick # 2

My Day of Coding last Friday turned up a really useful trick for passing data between Matlab and C/C++ during execution. Suppose you have some C++ code and lots of data, and you want to visualize or otherwise examine your data during runtime either to debug your code or just to make sure that things are happening the way you think they are. Matlab has provided tools to allow you to do just that: pass data from C/C++, during runtime, to Matlab. There, the data can be visualized or otherwise manipulated, and even sent back to C++. Not too bad.

The basic steps are:

• include engine.h - this is an include file that automatically installs with Matlab
• define an "engine" pointer, which opens up a portal between C++ and Matlab
• define Matlab-friendly data elements (mxArrays) for porting your data to Matlab
• stuff data into the Matlab-friendly data elements
• instruct C++ to send the Matlab-friendly data elements to Matlab
• instruct C++ what commands to execute on the data

There are of course more sophisticated options; see Matlab online documentation for more details.

I've put together a brief video outlining the technique. The code shown in the video can be downloaded from here: http://www.box.net/shared/xmazi14uv2

Brain Controlled Angry Birds

Emotiv ... Hmmm. We've heard nothing but negative comments about the emotiv as a research tool. God knows how they got this working.

Miguel Nicolelis on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart

I think the part that amazes me the most is that Miguel's publicist talked him into a nice collared shirt and a blazer. I'm not sure I've ever seen him wearing anything that wasn't a Brazil soccer shirt...

iPad Programming

A while ago I brought a new face to the lab to start developing some iPad programming infrastructure. Our eventual goal is to integrate the iPad into some neural engineering applications. For now we are learning some of the low-level odds-and-ends associated with creating code in the iOS environment. Today, Vince finally had a nice breakthrough and managed to get his first 'hello world' program installed on the iPad. We were quite pleased!

Here's a pic of Vince with his creation:

And here's a video of Vince's program running on his iPad:



We're finally making progress!

Neural Instrumentation Lab on CBS

Temple Engineering on CBS

EEG Brain Machine Interface

A couple of years ago, I mentored a Senior Design team whose project was to create an EEG-based Brain Machine Interface. They replicated the methods of Wolpaw and McFarland (2004) that were published in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. At the time it was published, that article was quite cutting edge, and yet only three years later, my seniors managed to replicate a good portion of it. Even more impressive was the fact that, instead of using a sophisticated commercial EEG data acquisition system, my seniors built their own EEG amplifier and digitizer, using the freely available OpenEEG design.

The students were only able to get cursor control working in one dimension (up/down) - they ran out of time to implement left/right. Even getting up/down to work was a pretty impressive accomplishment given the poor signal to noise ratio of the homegrown EEG system.

The video below shows their system doing its thing:



Credit goes to my 2007 Senior Design team: Jesse Krigelman, Matt Brooks, Drew Taylor, and Lee Chavous.