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This Defense Intelligence Reference Document was produced by the Defense Intelligence Agency's Defense Warning Office under the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications program and dated 23 March 2010. It surveys noninvasive and invasive brain-machine interface technologies, including EEG, MEG, fMRI, NIRS and implanted electrode arrays, that could control external devices without limb-operated interfaces. It concludes that noninvasive electrical monitoring is the most promising near-term approach. For the long term it favors invasive single-neuron cortical connections.
From the source:Release of 2026-09-18 Incident: 3/23/10, Las Vegas, Nevada. Released with redactions. This document is a Defense Intelligence Reference Document (DIRD), a technical reference format used by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) to capture baseline knowledge on a specific topic for later analytic use. DIRDs are best understood as reference and synthesis products rather than as original research. It is one of 38 DIRDs produced under the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program (AAWSAP) between 2009 and 2011. Because AAWSAP’s scope permitted a broad range of supporting topics, not every DIRD in the series directly concerns aerospace systems or future threat assessment. The following summary reflects the DIRD’s scope and framing at the time of writing and should not be read as implying current validation of the concepts discussed. This DIRD surveys brain-machine interface technologies intended to allow users to control external devices without conventional manual controls, and it evaluates both noninvasive and invasive approaches for turning neural or related physiological signals into usable commands. The report reviews the underlying neural signals, distinguishes between open- and closed-loop control systems, and examines technologies including scalp-based electrical recording, magnetic and imaging-based methods, and implanted cortical interfaces, with particular attention to bandwidth, response time, signal quality, and practical usability. It concludes that, in the near term, the most practical systems are likely to be noninvasive electrical approaches that draw heavily on muscle and neural signals, while longer-term high-bandwidth control would likely require more advanced invasive interfaces capable of robust two-way communication with individual neurons. The document presents thought-based control of external devices as a research field with plausible assistive and specialized applications, while emphasizing that naturalistic, high-performance control remained constrained by major technical and physiological limits.
“Anderson”1 page
UNCLASSIFIED/ /FOR: orr1e1J1tt Y!H: e .. tv The remainder of discussion concentrates on the surveyed studies into five technology areas, and listing their advantages and disadvantages, as well as their critical barriers to further development and likely future paths of research. NONINVASIVE ELECTRICAL DEVICES The current state-of-the-art BMI devices that have shown the most promise in the near term utilize muscle amplification of the neural signal. This is the result of commercial investment in development. These primarily EMG based systems are noninvasive connections to existing or constructed nerve-muscle pairs. Neurally operated prosthetics have been demonstrated such as the artificial hand. Decoding algorithms are nearly as fast as muscle response itself at selecting 1 of 10 actions. Commercial products for entertainment are available for normal, healthy consumers. These entertainment devices contain few sensors but make use of more complex decoding algorithms. All sensors don't just turn on and off, rather they can relay amplitude, polarity, and frequency of muscle action, as well as detect underlying spiking signals from neurons. This combination, along with algorithms developed from a support vector machine, will allow device selection of many more actions than the simple binary combinatorics of the number of sensors. The gaming market will drive this noninvasive technology in the next 5 years with advances in signal processing from current sensors. The EMG based systems can be scaled to a large number of sensors for a more complex control task. It has been demonstrated with amputees the feasibility to move existing nerves around to control existing muscles. There has not been a study yet to explore how many nerve-muscle pairs may be available for such use in a normal human, with or without reinnervation. Such a study could be done theoretically based on current and near term work with patients. The longer term for EMG will likely evolve toward very small, wireless chronic implants that operate near the skin surface and are easy to install and remove. Devices based solely on noninvasive detection of EEG signals from the cortex in normal, healthy individuals are unlikely in the next 5 years. This is primarily because of muscle noise filtering issues which will need to be solved through development of better EMG sensors and detection algorithms mentioned above. Even though such devices have been shown to work in laboratory settings, moving them to the arbitrary conditions in naturalistic settings introduces significant complication to signal detection and filtering that greatly limits the information transfer bandwidth to a fraction of the target 5 bits/sec. Also an issue is the origin of surface EEG signals, which are still under theoretical study even after 80 years. Some of the frequency bands directly related to spiking activity in axons are somewhat understood, but the whole of the signals contain many transients that are likely the more interesting and possibly more robust parts of brain activity. In the medium to long term, many applications are envisioned in surface or near surface detection of cortical spiking activity or ERP, once the background separation issue in naturalistic environments is addressed . However, these signals still require loca lized coherent firing of tens of thousands of neurons, a biological requirement that has lim ited the information transfer rates of these techniques to 1 bit/sec or less, which is well below target rates but could be useful for some applications. One can suppose an ultra-high density EEG, thousands of sensors with wireless micro probes embedded subcutaneously that track electrical activity and relative location UNCLASSIFIED/ /FOR. 8FFI@IJltL Y9I!! 9Htl" 24
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Official release, from the pursue collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. 36 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.