Five Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center (SSC) Pacific scientists and engineers spent the weekend deep in the recesses of downtown San Diego’s EvoNexus startup incubator for the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Brain Initiative’s first Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) Hackathon. In just two days, the team made significant progress on their project of choice: developing a non-invasive BCI device for epilepsy patients that would passively detect the onset of a seizure through brain activity, enact an airbag safety mechanism and send alerts to a trained service dog, a medical professional and a mechanism to auto-inject anti-seizure medication.
TeamSPAWAR, as they called themselves, was one of 16 international teams selected to participate in the hackathon focused on building BCIs for innovative neurotechnology applications.
A hackathon is a collaborative programming session typically lasting just a couple days meant to bring people with interest in a particular field together to create solutions to a problem or set of problems. The crossover between neuroscience, real-time data analytics and solving applied problems is what piqued the interest of team members Jamie Lukos and Matthew Yanagi, both researchers in the Human Performance Research Group at SSC Pacific.
“BCI is aligned with several of the projects we’re currently working on,” Lukos said. “We’re looking at how we take what we’ve learned about brain function and cognitive processing from the field of neuroscience over the last century, and determine how we can effectively utilize that knowledge in military-relevant scenarios to better equip and understand our Warfighters. Despite the vast potential, we haven’t gotten to the point where we use neurotechnology in our everyday lives, and it’s definitely not yet on the battlefield or on our ships. However, that reality is coming and our research focuses on enabling that future.”
Yanagi added that the hackathon was particularly relevant to several relationships the Center has with partners.
“One of our projects supports U.S. Army Medical Research and Materiel Command's Environmental Sensors in Training, Brain in Combat S&T Objective, and Non-Invasive Neuro-Assessment Devices programs,” he said. “These efforts utilize similar technologies from the hackathon and provide direct translation to program objectives.”
The real world application they tackled over the weekend is a big one, as 65 million people globally suffer from epilepsy. Using Muse, a commercial-off-the-shelf brain sensing headband, and NeuroPype, a BCI visual programming environment developed by Qusp, a University of California, San Diego startup company, TeamSPAWAR devised a way to have the device monitor brain activity and send an appropriate alert and response when signals deviate from the norm and indicate a seizure.
While the entire Electronic System for Epilepsy Identification of Zones ( eSEIZ) device and system wasn’t completed in the two-day period, the hackers were able to reach 70 percent and 85 percent completion on certain aspects of the project, including the signal input and data curation.
In addition to Lukos and Yanagi, TeamSPAWAR also included machine learning engineer Michael Walton and New Professionals Frank Lam and Mohammad Alam.
For more information about Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center Pacific, please visit: http://www.public.navy.mil/spawar/Pacific/Pages/default.aspx.