Ready for the brain age?

Are you a fan of motor sports?

If you are, you probably enjoy viewing information about machine performance during a race or training sessions. Thanks to technology, today you can monitor at a glance parameters such as car speed, gear, engine RPMs from your living room television. The driver and support team have access to many more details, including temperature in different locations and oil and tire pressures.As a spectator, how would you like to monitor driver performance?

After all, the beauty of “cyborg sports” such as F1 is the person-machine nexus, the union of human and machine. It would be just as interesting to monitor the pilot as the car. What is the driver’s heart rate? Respiration and oxygen saturation? Gaze? Eye blink rate? Temperature? Stress level? Information load? Fatigue level? Though this may sound far fetched, it may be soon become part of our quickly evolving lives in ways unexpected.

The issue is not leisurely. Every year, hundreds of thousands of people die in car accidents. A significant proportion of such accidents are associated to a decrease of performance due to fatigue, sleepiness or stress. Sleepiness reduces reaction time, vigilance, alertness and concentration, so that the ability to perform attention-based activities is impaired. These facts alone are sobering, but consider this: as much as 20% of the general population suffers to some degree from sleep disorders.

Three important developments in science and technology are rapidly converging into a new class of solutions to live (and sleep) safer and better. The first one is neuroscience. We are now entering the “brain age”, as new techniques and measurement systems open a window into our minds to access wide streams of data. As an example, with off-the-shelf portable electroencephalography equipment it is now possible to collect data from a few hundred channels, each with exquisite precision. Thanks to such advances, we are now beginning to understand processes such as sleep and learning.

The second one is computation. Moore’s law, which sets and exponential rate for the evolution of computer performance, implies that, together with advances in mathematics and physics, we can readily handle huge amounts of data to extract simple pieces of information and better models.

The third one is in the area of micro and nanosystems. Ubiquitous (everywhere, all the time) sensing and computing are on the horizon. Sensors are now being designed to be embedded in clothing, the bedroom, office, car…Invisible systems will monitor your body constants and behaviour, gathering data to feed programs looking for signs of fatigue, sleep problems, stress and general disease. Wearable communications technologies such as the forthcoming Zigbee (the low power evolution of Bluetooth) or Ultra Wide Band will plug these sensors to the wide information net.

In European and national funded projects, scientists all over Europe are working today together with industry on the development of science and technology to better monitor our brains and bodies during our daily routines. Such technologies include sensors for heart rate, blood pressure, temperature, oxygen saturation, eye blink rate and gaze direction, respiration and the electrical activity generated in our brain and bodies. There is a downside: perhaps one day you will be stopped by the police on the freeway and subjected to a fatigue test. Or your car will refuse you to let you drive.

For more info see http://starlab.es and http://www.sensation-eu.org