Ctrl-labs: Controlling your mouse pointer with your mind might sound like a science fiction scenario, but Ctrl-labs, a startup based in New York, is trying to make it a reality.
In June, The company raised $28 million from companies including: Lux Capitals and GV (formerly Google Ventures), and Alphabet's venture capital group (mother a Google company).
What convinced the technology giants to fund the new company was the idea and, of course, the executives who make up the scientific team.
Thomas Reardon, the founder and CEO of Ctrl-labs is a graduate student in mathematical sciences at MIT and spearheaded a project by Microsoft for Internet Explorer. A few years later, he enrolled at Columbia University, where he studied neuroscience and managed to get his Ph.D.
2015, Reardon, along with fellow neuroscientists Patrick Kaifosh and Tim Machado, created Ctrl-labs with a specific mission:
To answer the bigger questions in the field of computer science, neuroscience and design.
Soon after, the team built their first product: a wristband that reads the signalthose that pass from the brain to the hand.
The armband with small gold-plated circuit boards is made to adhere tightly to the skin, although it is still in very early stages. A cable connects contacts to a Raspberry Pi, which in turn is wirelessly connected to a PC running Ctrl-Labs software.
The armband uses differential electromyography (EMG) (first observed in 1666 by the Italian physician Francesco Redi) to convert cerebral intention into action.
How does it work?
Measuring the changes in electrical potential caused by the pulses moving from the brain muscles to the hands through the motor neurons. This information-rich pathway in the nervous system consists of two parts: the upper motor neurons that are directly connected to the center of the brain and the lower ones that correspond to the muscle fibers. Neurotransmitters run the length of this long nerve pathway and convert or remove individual muscle fibers. If you did not understand, talk about the organic equivalent of one and zero.
The armband is quite sensitive:
"It works like an antenna and so it is prone to interference."
Data from 16 arrays of the armband are processed by Ctrl-labs software, which with the help of a mechanical learning algorithm is trained using Google's TensorFlow to distinguish the individual pulses of each nerve.
Below you can see revolutionary technology in action in the two videos released by VB:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AibJ9EuLTcE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ffJTYn6DNY
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