Comment by xk_id | Hacker News Reader

Comment by xk_id | Hacker News Reader

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Those non-invasive headbands (which work very differently from implanted electrodes) are notoriously inaccurate at recording brain signals. Even scientific studies, which use advanced setups like the 10-20 system for scalp EEG, face unsolved challenges in removing noise from the data and in using the data to reconstruct underlying brain activity [0] – let alone making meaningful inferences about it.

Patients with locked-in syndrome (one of the use cases mentioned in the article, also called a pseudo-coma), or with other disorders of consciousness, are unable to protest, or to confirm the accuracy of the generative message which is being attributed to them. Communicating on your own terms and in your own words is fundamental to human dignity.

Meanwhile, this coincides with lukewarm reception of generative AI from consumers; perhaps it is the lack of autonomy of locked-in patients, which makes them an interesting segment to this new generation of ventures, scrambling for a ROI on the enormous over-investment in the sector.

The conference venues look lush tho.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electroencephalography#Artifac...

I've spoken to a lot of smart people on the topic of EEG (I'm in a very related field). I agree with you.

It's an extremely powerful tool for diagnosis of a limited range of conditions but it is not magic. Electrical signal gets attenuated heavily when signals are not on the outside of the brain. Even still, a headband like this is susceptible to noise from movement and other factors. You either need to correct for this with AI, which introduces a second source for error, or you need a very still user. I'm not convinced by the ability to "read minds" with the technology; I would need the man in the video answer some specific questions to be convinced.

Is this better than not being able to communicate at all? Yes.

What they need to provide is surveys from the patients without the device (even locked in patients can often communicate slowly via eye-scan interfaces). How well do the patients rate the system at aligning with what they want to say?

If they don't find that it aligns at all, then honestly that is worse than nothing. Imagine being locked in and your family communicating with an LLM pretending to be you - all while you have to watch and can't do anything about it.

It might be beneficial to the family though, but indeed not to you.

I'd argue the family doesn't have the right to feel better at your expense, over something that was no one's fault.

I spent a long time trying to do some sort of machine learning over the OpenBCI helmet's data with the eventual goal of moving a cursor, but I didn't seem to get anywhere. The data was indeed _extremely_ noisy, and I don't believe my model ever converged to anything useful.

That said, I was just a high schooler and so my method of collecting training data was to run the script and "think really hard about moving left". Probably could have been a good deal more sophisticated too.

If it's any consolation for young you, this is a really hard problem, even with electrodes implanted in the brain. There's an amazing podcast by lex with the team from NeuralLink, and they go into depth on how even with good neuron signals, there's still a lot of work on the software side to "moving a cursor". The first recipient of their implant still has to do a 10-30min calibration run every morning to be able to move a cursor reliably on the screen. So all in all, don't beat yourself up, it's a really hard problem even with good data.

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