Direct-Sense Brain–Computer Interfaces and Wearable Computers

Brain–computer interfaces (BCIs) allow users to communicate directly with external devices via their brain signals. Recently, BCIs, and wearable computers in particular, have been receiving more attention by government and industry as an alternative means of interacting with technology. Wearable computers can combine highly immersive virtual/augmented/mixed reality experiences for entertainment, health monitoring, utilitarian purposes, and, most importantly at present, research. With wearable computers, researchers can design, simulate, and finely control experiments to examine human–brain dynamics outside the laboratory. Yet despite the power of BCIs, take-up is slow. This form of interaction is unnatural to humans and often requires external stimuli. Further, the response feedback produced by the computer part of the system is nowhere near as quick as our brains. Hence, we undertook a review of the current state-of-the-art in BCI research and distilled the current findings into a stimulus-free BCI, called direct-sense BCIs, that operates directly and seamlessly from our thinking. This is a novel paradigm that, in the short term, could substantially improve the quality of a user’s experience with BCI, and, over the long term, lead to much more widespread take-up of BCI technology.